My point is that clearly, small events are effective at sustaining ties, and so we should have some. I also am very suspicious of some common elements like singing in unison. They’re common enough to be perceived as secular, and so not given the same skepticism as explicit trappings of religion. I think this is a mistake. They have a literally hypnotic effect such that they tend to override standard skeptical filters, and I don’t see them as any less dangerous to epistemics when they are used to promote a fairly-good ideology.
My concern is that. used uncarefully, complex ceremonies and ritual creates belief system lock-in. The more you include, the more content you are embedding that is bypassing evidence-based reasoning and getting treated as true until the audience thinks to question it. Knowing that even the best belief system assuredly has flaws, I think it is wrong to do this any more than absolutely necessary.
So, there’s obviously a bunch of disagreements I have there, but they don’t feel like they’re touching on any of my cruxes. (I listed four major events, only one of which was especially ritualized. I feel like my arguments stay mostly the same in a parallel world where Solstice doesn’t exist)
I do agree that there should be more small events of the sort you describe. I’m not as excited about them as you because I think it’s a lot harder to get lots of people to do a distributed small event than a big event.
I also just don’t feel a need for that many repeated events, large or small, and I feel close-to-saturated on them. (to add an additional repeated event, I’d either need to sacrifice a currently-in-rotation repeat event, or sacrifice the ability to try new things)
My point is that clearly, small events are effective at sustaining ties, and so we should have some. I also am very suspicious of some common elements like singing in unison. They’re common enough to be perceived as secular, and so not given the same skepticism as explicit trappings of religion. I think this is a mistake. They have a literally hypnotic effect such that they tend to override standard skeptical filters, and I don’t see them as any less dangerous to epistemics when they are used to promote a fairly-good ideology.
My concern is that. used uncarefully, complex ceremonies and ritual creates belief system lock-in. The more you include, the more content you are embedding that is bypassing evidence-based reasoning and getting treated as true until the audience thinks to question it. Knowing that even the best belief system assuredly has flaws, I think it is wrong to do this any more than absolutely necessary.
So, there’s obviously a bunch of disagreements I have there, but they don’t feel like they’re touching on any of my cruxes. (I listed four major events, only one of which was especially ritualized. I feel like my arguments stay mostly the same in a parallel world where Solstice doesn’t exist)
I do agree that there should be more small events of the sort you describe. I’m not as excited about them as you because I think it’s a lot harder to get lots of people to do a distributed small event than a big event.
I also just don’t feel a need for that many repeated events, large or small, and I feel close-to-saturated on them. (to add an additional repeated event, I’d either need to sacrifice a currently-in-rotation repeat event, or sacrifice the ability to try new things)