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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33044 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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I’m really getting the urge to grow out my neckbeard and get euphoric up in this bitch. Postrats are converting to Mormonism now, Mormonism! At least with wokeness you have to go outside and observe the world to realize that it’s false. Most of these religions don’t even make sense on their own terms.

It’s cope is what it is, cope. It makes you feel good, and it’s useful (so it seems), so you believe it.

Choosing to believe (or act as if you believe) useful things seems very rational to me. I have an old coworker who was an atheist and cynically became a Mormon in order to marry a Mormon wife and live in a close-knit community. He now lives in Idaho and has 4 kids and by all accounts is very satisfied with the outcome. Who's more rational, him or a depressed medicated outspokenly atheist Bay area tech worker who's the least-liked member of his drama-cursed polycule?

If you rational long enough, you're eventually going to rational about rationality, and you'll see that beliefs are instrumental like anything else. There's no God of Integrity who laid down the law that you must profess true beliefs.

The short answer is, it fucks up your epistemology. It’s probably worth a whole post going through exactly why that’s so bad. Perhaps the old atheism arguments from the early 2000s need updating for the TikTok generation.

It definitely deserves a longer treatment than one sentence, but I'm fond of "once you've told a lie all truth is your enemy". Or something about lightning, I guess. Intentionally professing beliefs in falsehoods because they are useful is the epistemic equivalent of the doctor killing their patients to donate their organs -- it may sound like it does more good then harm in the short term, but you wouldn't want to live in a place where that's the rule.

I disagree. You can be rational when the situation calls for it, and be religious on a meta level.

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