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Notes -
The definition I'm working from is the one I laid out above: an incorrect fixed belief that is immune to updating on empirical evidence. Of course, the sufferers from said delusion often will claim to have empirical evidence in favor, but said evidence is, shall we say, scanty.
If you want me to believe in the existent of an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omnibenevolent Deity, then firstly, I would expect the world to look rather different than it does. If you want to explain away the discrepancies, then I expect more than a book compiled from the accounts of questionably educated Bronze Age nomads. How convenient, that the miracles dry up when cameras and the internet arise. Maybe AI video will cause a second Renaissance. I live in hope.
See. I'm a rather nice person, if I say so myself. I have no intention of making a viral TikTok channel. I also do not, to the best of my knowledge, pull "pranks" on the delusional. I do not convince manic patients to give me their money, grannies with dementia to write me into their will or ask hot women with BPD to sleep with me while they're splitting and consider me the best doctor to ever live (with one notable exception, but let's not talk about my ex).
Must I imagine some? Very well. I might consider opening a church and appoint myself pastor. I might make the (reasonable) case that God rewards devotion with material reward, including money and success. I might even call it a prosperity gospel.
I might then convince my eager, gullible flock that God demands that they pay for my private jet. Trickle down economics backed by theological currency, as we say in the business.
Oh.
Wait.
You mean to say that my entirely hypothetical prank is... real? In the year of your lord 2026? Huh.
I guess I'll fall back to my backup plan, finding a few gold tablets and asking ChatGPT to translate ancient Egyptian papyri to support claims of ancient Jewish settlement in the Americas. Surely no one's thought of that one. If all else fails, I'm sure describing a very real journey around the world on the back of a flying horse will do the trick. I might not even need to leverage my mild fame as a niche scifi author.
I hope you get my point. I don't know if the kinds of people who found and spread religion are more likely to be grifters or mentally ill, or maybe both.
I could elaborate further, I could do this all day, but you have a distressing tendency to vanish whenever I make an effort post calling out a bad argument you make, for n>>1. Why bother? You can go read some archived Atheist vs Theist Grand Debate, or watch something on YouTube. I'm too old for this shit, I just sigh at perceived silliness and get on with my life while doing my job as best as I can. If your God did his job, I wouldn't have to do mine, and I could definitely use a break.
[EDIT] - I'll leave the below for clarity, but I think I can make things even simpler.
Here are three beliefs:
someone throwing salt at you is casting a lethal curse.
Some guy you've just met has had a divine revelation and now speaks for God.
Someone two thousand years ago was God, and we have a ~1900-year-old book laying out his teachings.
Let us presume that all three of these beliefs are wrong. Your argument, as I understand it, is that they are wrong in the exact same way, such that all three will result in essentially identical behaviors. Am I understanding you correctly?
That seems like a reasonably good definition. You should apply it rigorously.
Walls of text are unnecessary here. This is really quite simple. Based on the following paragraph, you pretty clearly believe one of the following:
That all Christians here are members of a financially-exploitative tele-evangelist-style megachurch, or are initial converts to mormonism, or both
That those of us who are not members of a financially-exploitative tele-evangelist-style megachurch or are initial converts to mormonism, nonetheless fall victim to similar forms of grifting.
Both of these examples appear very different from your salt curse example, being far more abstract and elaborate. But then, I'm fairly confident that most Christians you converse with here have never been initial converts to mormonism, and also have never donated money to a tele-evangelist or similar. Your position appears to be that we must be falling for some other, unspecified grift. Only, why not specify it?
The straightforward explanation is that you can't. You want to claim that we are delusional. You claim that our beliefs are exactly identical to an obvious delusion. I ask for examples, you give much weaker examples that do not actually apply, and then handwave.
I certainly agree that someone has a habit of making bad arguments. Sadly, I have much, much less time to write than I used to.
But here, specifically, you do not need to elaborate further, because you have not actually elaborated at all. Nor does God even come into the argument in any substantive way. I asked you for an example of how my delusion might be exploited in an obvious, empirical fashion. You have failed to provide one. This isn't some pedantic gotcha; you are making a very strong claim that is in fact indefensible, when a small amount of moderation would put you on much firmer ground. You appear to be doing this because you are failing to parse the details of your own statements in anything like a rigorous fashion.
Suppose I argued that Atheists are all bloodthirsty murderers, and when questioned pointed to the 75-100 million murders from atheist regimes in the last century, and claimed your beliefs were exactly identical to theirs. I do not think you would consider this a valid argument, but if there's a difference between such an argument and what you're presenting here, I'm not seeing it. Perhaps you could point it out? While both they and you were atheists, is there perhaps some notable set of differences between how their atheism and yours operated? If such differences can exist between their atheism and yours, why would you suppose that no differences exist between how my belief in God operates, and how the belief in God of first generation Mormons or African salt-fearers operates?
See, FC, I don't have the time, nor do I care to write a 5 million word polemic that addresses the irrationality of every single religious, sect or cult on the face of the Earth. I think I have pointed out the mechanisms through which hundreds of millions or billions of people have been bilked or fleeced, and my conscience floats as light as a feather.
... Religion. Religion itself is the grift.
Since you will obviously disagree, I chose to start with examples that even you would find examples you would agree with.
Just because I can do this all day doesn't mean I want to do this all day. I have bodily needs that aren't rehashing the usual arguments ad-nauseaum, with a probability of you changing your mind that is a floating point error away from 0.
You seem to accept my operational definition of delusion. Then you ask me to apply it "rigorously".
Good rhetoric. Take a point. I think the implied argument is something like: "Your definition, applied consistently, would classify your own beliefs as delusions too."
But once again, you enjoy the benefit of implication, without making an argument I can engage with it. I can't rebut an argument that hasn't been stated. If you wants to argue that my belief in, say, scientific consensus on some contested empirical question constitutes a "fixed belief immune to updating," I'm genuinely happy to hear that case. Until it's made, I'm going to file this under "ominous foreshadowing that didn't pay off."
I gave examples of religious exploitation you claim don't apply to the Christians you know personally on this forum. Therefore I've "failed to provide" an example of how their delusion could be exploited. Therefore my claim that they are deluded (in the same sense as my clinical examples) is indefensible.
But this conflates two things that should be kept separate: exploitability and having been exploited.
Here's a toy analogy. Suppose I claim that a certain class of people systematically overestimate their driving ability - this is actually a well-documented cognitive bias where the majority of drivers rate themselves as above-average. Now suppose you respond: "Oh yeah? Show me an accident that I specifically caused due to overconfidence in my driving." This would be a strange objection. The point is about the cognitive architecture, not about whether any individual instance of the bias has caused identifiable harm to the specific person you're addressing.
Similarly, my point is not that every Christian has donated to a televangelist or converted to Mormonism. My point is that the cognitive mechanism that generates and sustains religious belief - specifically, the acceptance of extraordinary empirical claims on the basis of testimony, tradition, and subjective experience, with a fairly robust resistance to revision - is the same cognitive mechanism that makes people vulnerable to those exploits. The exploit is diagnostic of the mechanism. The absence of the exploit from your specific history doesn't mean the mechanism isn't there. How exacy am I supposed to know if you've done anything stupid because of your particular, potentially idiosyncratic beliefs? Do I look like God to you? I would have hoped he was more handsome, albeit not quite as articulate.
Would I consider that a bad argument?
Yes, duh. But here's the asymmetry: the claim about atheist regimes is a claim about what certain atheists did, not about a cognitive property that atheism itself entails.
Atheism is the absence of a belief - specifically the absence of theism. It doesn't, by itself, generate any positive empirical commitment that could be exploited. The Soviet state didn't murder people because atheism makes you susceptible to believing false things about kulaks. It murdered people for a complex of political, ideological, and economic reasons that were in no way entailed by the mere absence of belief in God. Nor is insane mass murder exclusive to atheism, because... most of history. I invite you to demonstrate that the average atheist is more likely to murder people than the average religious person. You will fail, but I would enjoy seeing you try.
Whereas my claim about religious belief is precisely about a cognitive property that religious belief does entail - namely, the acceptance of empirical claims (miracles, revelation, answered prayer etc etc) via methods that systematically bypass the kinds of verification we'd demand in other contexts.
This isn't an incidental feature of religion; it's constitutive of it. You can't be a Christian while remaining genuinely, symmetrically skeptical about the Resurrection in the same way you're skeptical about, say, claims for homeopathy. The belief structure requires differential standards of evidence. Religion stripped of unfounded empirical claims is simply philosophy, which is far less exciting.
So the analogy doesn't hold. One is a claim about behavior that some members of a group happened to exhibit. The other is a claim about a structural feature of the belief system itself.
I also agree with your agreement about bad arguments, and I sympathize with a lack of time. And yet here you are, yet here I am. I must say that I do appreciate you attempting to take a stand instead of vanishing when challenged, I would be happy if you kept doing this, or at the very least acknowledge that you no longer wish to continue the debate.
I didn't ask you to. I asked you to admit that, even accepting that we are deceived, different sorts of deception operate in different ways and have different consequences, on a purely materialistic level.
Unless I am mistaken, I have not ever attempted an argument with you in which I claimed God was real and you should believe in him. Every one of these discussions, from my perspective, has been about how logic and reason operate, and all of my arguments appear to me to work equally well if one assumes that there is no God at all. And yet, it does not seem that you have ever recognized this, so let me make it as explicit as possible: for the purposes of this conversation, there is no God and my faith in him is in fact delusional.
I don't. See above.
What I object to is your apparent belief that my faith makes me irrational in obvious exploitable ways, which is why I asked you to explain what those might be. At no point have I argued that my belief is correct, nor do I do so now. You are certain I am irrational, and that is well enough and cheerfully reciprocated. But then you go further and claim that my irrationality is of the sort that imposes immediate, obvious, unnecessary costs. This does not appear to me to be true, and I do not think I am being unreasonable to point out that you are arguing well beyond your actual evidence to make such claims.
If my beliefs are irrational, they are irrational in a way that does not appear to significantly reduce my fitness even from a materialist perspective. Certainly it does not impose costs on me of the sort that you seem to be arguing are typical of religious belief. I do not fear salt curses, nor do I donate to tele-evangelists, nor do I join novel cults. I do believe in a two-thousand-year-old religion, and shape my life by it, but even assuming that I am deceived to do so, it is not obvious where this deceit cashes out in terms of concrete, material loss, in the way your examples center on.
Is that a sufficiently engageable argument?
It seems obvious to me that you have a firm belief that Christians or other believers, being delusional, must suffer significant material consequences as their delusions wreck against material reality, while those such as yourself who do not suffer from such delusions do not incur similar costs. Would you agree that this is an accurate summary of your argument?
Your definition of delusion:
You appear to have a belief that the religious, as a class, are delusional, and that their delusions make them particularly exploitable. You appear to believe that this is an intrinsic characteristic of all religion, such that I myself must be increasingly susceptible to exploitation. Even if I and (most? All?) others here do not appear to have been exploited in any specific way you can identify, this should not be considered contrary evidence to your claims, because your theory takes precedence over our reported facts.
Sure. You can measure the people's self-assessment, and compare it to the accidents they've been in, and note the disparity. If 90% of people believe they're in the top 10% of good drivers, at least eight in ten of them are wrong. So what's the analogous measure of material outcomes for the relatively-intellectual religious mottizens?
If you say "people like you overestimate their driving ability", and I note that I think I'm actually pretty bad at driving, there's likewise a disconnect there, no? If I don't in fact overestimate my skill at driving, in what sense are these people "like me"? Alternatively, if I think I'm a top-10% driver, and can back it up with my actual driving record, there's a disconnect again, isn't there?
If you claim I or people like me are exploitable, the way to back that up is with examples of how we have or plausibly might be exploited, in the same way that overestimation of one's driving ability is demonstrated by comparison to population-level driving outcomes. If your claim is that we're exploitable despite not having been exploited, where do you think the conversation should go from there? If you've rejected empirical evidence, what would you prefer?
That is exactly the question I am trying to get you to engage with. You appear to believe that you can know that I've done, or will do, or am prone to do something stupid because of my particular, potentially-idiosyncratic beliefs. As I understand it, that's your entire thesis!
Atheism in its modern form has routinely and strongly correlated with a particular strong antipathy toward Christianity in particular, the exultation of "reason" that has consistently proved to be fantastically unreasonable, and support for revolutionary social and political changes that have proved disastrous. I'm pretty confident that Atheists as a population much more positive attitudes toward both Communism and Fascism than non-atheists of the same societies.
Soviet atheism does indeed have been upstream of their mass-murder, as evidenced by their pro-murder arguments relying heavily on atheist moral frameworks; contemplate how the term "liquidate" came to be applied to large-scale murder. I would argue that the actual flow went Enlightenment principles/exultation of human rationality > atheism > mass murder.
Explicitly atheist states produced unusually concentrated forms of it, in sharp contrast to contemporary non-atheist states. Appealing to "most of history" doesn't get you around the unusually-appalling nature of ideological totalitarianism in the twentieth century, nor the prominent role atheism played in those ideologies, nor the prominent role the Religious played in opposing them.
You are claiming that structural features of one belief system naturally incline it toward particular outcomes, even in cases where those outcomes can't be demonstrated. Then you are claiming that particular outcomes that can be demonstrated, repeatedly, at horrifying scale, are only "behavior that some members of a group happened to exhibit." You know what a Russell's Conjugation is. I am pretty sure you understand that you are not drawing a rigorous line from first principles here.
My entire point here was that it would be quite bold to claim that atheism leads to mass murder, even with the ton of examples of atheism actually leading to mass-murder that we actually have, and even with the evidence we have that the atheism does in fact appear to have been a significant part of the causal flow. Even with that evidence, I don't claim all atheists are prone to mass murder because it's a whole lot more complicated than that. But you have no problem doing that the other way, on much weaker evidence. This is foolishness.
You are still trying to force me into a claim so much dumber than my real one that I am half-tempted to accept it out of pity, the way one humors a confused child who has mistaken a pigeon for a parrot.
I did not say that all false beliefs are identical in content, origin, phenomenology, or social consequences. I did not say that the average Christian is clinically indistinguishable from a man trying to dig the MI6 transmitter out of his bone marriwnwith a spoon. I did not say that every religion is equally harmful/easy to exploit. I only said I find them equally laughable. You keep reaching for that version because it is easier to refute than the one I actually wrote.
My actual position is annoyingly moderate. Religion belongs on the same broad spectrum of fixed false belief as superstition, paranoia, overvalued ideas, and delusion, but in a milder, more culturally normalized, more socially buffered, and often less acutely impairing form. That is all. That is the claim. If you want to fight me, fight that one, not the straw homunculus you have assembled from indignation.
Your "what prank can you pull on us?" argument is a particularly bad detour, because exploitability is not the essence of irrationality. It is one possible consequence among many. A false belief does not become rational merely because it is not easy to monetize.
Suppose a man sincerely believes the moon is made of cheese. This belief is false. It is fixed. It is almost certainly resistant to the relevant evidence. It is also mostly inert. He will still wake up, brush his teeth, commute to work, and remember his anniversary. He may humiliate himself at dinner parties. He may post with great confidence on subjects that ought to humble him. But the fact that I cannot found a billion-dollar scam empire on lunar Camembert does not somehow promote him into the ranks of the epistemically elect.
If the Moon is too close and topically relevant, then please pretend that he holds this belief about a random celestial object 2 million light-years away. It doesn't particularly matter for my argument.
Likewise with phobias. A person can be pathologically afraid of spiders without being especially easy to grift. A person can have bizarre, rigid, maladaptive beliefs that only surface in narrow domains. "Can this belief be exploited by a prankster?" is not a serious criterion. It is a criterion you reached for because the salt example made the comparison uncomfortable.
And yes, obviously there is a difference between "this stranger threw salt at me and now I am doomed" and "a man two thousand years ago was God incarnate, and a long tradition with libraries, cathedrals, councils, and dead languages tells me so." Of course there is. One belief has vastly more social proof, prestige, and inherited scaffolding behind it. That matters. Out of respect for the fact that you have continued engaging with me, I will concede that not all religions are equally ludicrous in my eyes, though I consider are all ludicrous to some degree. This is the biggest concession you will get out of me.
A brand-new cult founded last Thursday by a charismatic lunatic with excellent cheekbones and piercing eyes has much less Bayesian cover than a religion that has survived centuries. Social consensus is evidence in the Bayesian sense. Not decisive evidence, not good enough to get you home, but evidence nonetheless. It makes the belief more understandable. It makes the believer less individually blameworthy. It makes the whole thing more stable and often less behaviorally explosive.
It does not make it true.
This is the part you keep trying not to notice. Cultural legitimacy is not a sacrament that transmutes bad epistemology into good epistemology. A polished falsehood is still a falsehood. A high-status delusion is still a delusion wearing robes and speaking in iambic pentameter.
Psychiatry already understands this, which is why psychiatry does not simply define mental illness as "being wrong about things." If we did, half the species would qualify before breakfast, 90% by dinner. The actual questions are practical ones. Is the belief fixed? Is it culturally incongruent? Does it cause disproportionate harm? Does it impair function? Can we intervene usefully? These are thresholds of remit, not revelations from Sinai about what counts as rational belief.
A mole and a melanoma are both unpleasant growths that do no good for you. Only one gets you rushed to oncology. This is not because the mole has attained ontological innocence or has become good for you. It is because medicine triages severity rather than pretending low-grade pathology has become health by popular acclaim.
Religion is similar. The average religious believer is not in my professional remit because he is usually functional, socially supported, and not trying to peel his skin off to get at the government microchip. This is not a concession that his beliefs are suddenly epistemically robust. It means only that psychiatry is a field of applied damage control, not a celestial customs office sorting healthy minds from unhealthy ones with metaphysical perfection.
And yes, selection pressure matters. Religions are, among other things, Lindy cults. The most brittle, virulent, self-destructive versions tend not to do well over long timescales. If your movement reliably persuades followers to castrate themselves, drink poison, or await the spaceship behind the comet on a date reality can falsify by Tuesday, you do not get a thousand years to refine the theology. The religions that survive are often those that have learned, explicitly or otherwise, to become harder to falsify, less immediately socially destructive, and more symbiotic with ordinary life.
That does not acquit them. It just means reality has already done some pruning.
Jonestown is a cult with the sharp edges still attached. Anglicanism is a cult whose sharp edges have been filed down over centuries until half the congregation is there for weak tea, social continuity, and the vague sense that one ought to be reverent around stained glass. The latter is obviously less dangerous. It does not follow that transubstantiation has become less silly at the molecular level.
Your atheist analogy fails for the same reason. "Atheist" is too expansive a category to do the work you want it to do. Stalinism was not merely atheism plus bad manners.
I will restate the point I consider obvious. Here it is: the murderous atheist regimes of the 20th century were not murderous because of their atheism. Their atheism was, at best, incidental - a byproduct of a broader ideological framework that happened to have excised God and replaced him with the State, History, or the Party. The killing followed from the positive doctrines, not from the absence of a belief. You cannot derive "shoot the kulaks" from "there is no God" without considerable additional scaffolding for the framework. For an existence proof, consider that I am an atheist and have murdered 0.000... kulaks.
In exactly the same way, prosperity-gospel hucksterism is not identical to theism as such. If your objection is that I am flattening all religious cognition into one blob, perhaps do not immediately flatten all irreligion into Pol Pot wearing a "There Is No God" pin.
You keep demanding a false binary. Either religion is exactly the same as florid psychosis, or else it belongs to some protected category of respectable belief that cannot be grouped with superstition, paranoia, magical thinking, or delusion at all. No. Reality is not obligated to fit your neat little bins. I have expended great effort into explaining the nuance here.
Some false beliefs are mild. Some are catastrophic. Some are culturally reinforced. Some are private and bizarre. Some are emotionally intelligible. Some arrive like malware. Some merely make you tedious at parties. Some get you exorcised. Some get you elected. They can still belong to the same family without being interchangeable.
That was my point from the beginning. It remains my point now.
So let me say it as plainly as I can:
No, I do not think the median churchgoer is equivalent to a floridly psychotic inpatient.
Yes, I do think the median churchgoer holds beliefs that are false, unusually resistant to empirical correction, and granted an extraordinary amount of deference because they happen to be old, common, and ornamented.
No, "it is not easy to prank me with this belief" does not rescue it.
No, the fact that some religious traditions are more sophisticated, adaptive, or socially beneficial than others does not move them out of the broad territory of irrational conviction. It just makes them better engineered examples of it.
And no, I do not need Mormon gold plates, Nigerian salt curses, medieval relic fraud, prosperity gospel, and Nicene Christianity to be identical in every respect in order to notice that they rhyme.
You seem to want a world where the only irrationality worth naming is the kind that sprints shrieking from table salt. Unfortunately, most human irrationality is much better dressed than that. It wears vestments. It has tenure. It quotes Aquinas. It donates to charity. It teaches its children to be kind. And when asked for evidence, it suddenly develops a passion for metaphor.
That it is sometimes benign (or not pathological to a degree we feel obligated to treat), sometimes socially useful, and often aesthetically superior to the alternatives does not make it sane.
It makes it successful. I hold it in contempt nonetheless, because I care about epistemic purity. Sue me.
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Is that better or worse than staying around long enough to declare the conversation over due to difficulties in your position and then insulting people to dismiss them when other difficulties are found in related positions?
Ah. You. You do not have the power to make me engage with you after you've annoyed me.
I think it is abundantly clear that I am unusually willing to engage in debate and spend an immense amount of effort in elaborating on my arguments, usually in good faith. That includes people I earnestly disagree with or those who dislike me.
I think that is evidence that someone who still manages to annoy me into disengaging is more likely to be in the wrong than I am. I think I was sufficiently clear and took great pains to make my position clear, but as Yudkowsky said, you can't win an argument with a rock, at least not if you expect a written concession. You can't even get the rock to admit that your position is internally consistent and coherent, even if it disagrees with the premises. I would still rather argue with the rock.
But what do I know? Let the court of public opinion be the judge, and let it make a ruling in-absentia. I'm not interested in showing up for this hearing. I hang out and chat here because I like to, not because I am obliged to.
I would also like to note that if we are inferring characteristics of our interlocutors from our own demonstrated efforts, I find it conveniently-timed that it is hard to say that I am unwilling to put in significant effort in good faith to understand vague terminology. I actually often thrive in environments where we don't have strict technical definitions, and we're trying to work through how to construct terminology that most closely matches our vague intuitions. I have one particular term at work that I've been saying I only have a "working definition" for for the past 4-5 years, because it still has plenty of vagueness around the edges and we're still learning stuff about it.
I am perfectly happy working with you on some amount of vagueness in your terms. But, as stipulated above, the natural inference is that you've given me nothing to work with. Not even an attempt.
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It's kind of hard to admit that something is consistent and coherent when you can't even say what the terms mean. How would one check? "Blurfs are bleep." Is that consistent and coherent? How can one know, unless they know what those things are? At least when rocks use words, we know what they mean. (Heh, trivially true, since rocks don't use words.)
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