I applaud you on your willingness to share this experience. I might even call it brave, because there is a strong sort of stigma against anything religious in most “rationalist” circles. I also congratulate you on finding a workable solution in spite of those stigmas, rather than sticking to absurd, self-contrived constraints on being Rational(TM). I hardly think that church-going is the best long-term solution to a chronic negativity problem, but when supposedly ideal methods are shown to consistently fail in some way or another.. Well, there’s a word for doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The causes of this sort of thing have been discussed elsewhere, and I’m sure are being reiterated in other comments right now. Believe me, Swimmer, you’re not the first person to think of it. It always comes up sooner or later. We even have a few names for it: Reversed Stupidity, Being Half A Rationalist, or even Meta-Signaling. ;-)
Couldn’t tell you what the answer is though, short of starting up a dojo for rationality and drilling the community into us. I would think that an actual Less Wrong group would be a better place to find that sort of positive community than just an assortment of nontheists, since we do seem rather dedicated to moving beyond developing a hard shell skepticism and into the greater realm of Luminous living and group rationality.
Note: Okay, you might notice some of this is jokingly taken from The Simple Truth. I had way too much fun with that reference to spoil it in text, but school has instilled in me a healthy fear of plagiarism so I’m just letting you know.
“I applaud you on your willingness to share this experience. I might even call it brave, because there is a strong sort of stigma against anything religious in most “rationalist” circles.”
Actually, what I’ve been thinking is “I should post controversial-by-Lesswrong-standards things more often.” This post has double the comments of any of my other posts.
See the ‘Help’ link at the bottom right of the comment box for explanations of the Markdown syntax used here. In particular, quote a paragraph by preceding it by “>”.
I applaud you on your willingness to share this experience. I might even call it brave, because there is a strong sort of stigma against anything religious in most “rationalist” circles. I also congratulate you on finding a workable solution in spite of those stigmas, rather than sticking to absurd, self-contrived constraints on being Rational(TM). I hardly think that church-going is the best long-term solution to a chronic negativity problem, but when supposedly ideal methods are shown to consistently fail in some way or another.. Well, there’s a word for doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The causes of this sort of thing have been discussed elsewhere, and I’m sure are being reiterated in other comments right now. Believe me, Swimmer, you’re not the first person to think of it. It always comes up sooner or later. We even have a few names for it: Reversed Stupidity, Being Half A Rationalist, or even Meta-Signaling. ;-)
Couldn’t tell you what the answer is though, short of starting up a dojo for rationality and drilling the community into us. I would think that an actual Less Wrong group would be a better place to find that sort of positive community than just an assortment of nontheists, since we do seem rather dedicated to moving beyond developing a hard shell skepticism and into the greater realm of Luminous living and group rationality.
Note: Okay, you might notice some of this is jokingly taken from The Simple Truth. I had way too much fun with that reference to spoil it in text, but school has instilled in me a healthy fear of plagiarism so I’m just letting you know.
“I applaud you on your willingness to share this experience. I might even call it brave, because there is a strong sort of stigma against anything religious in most “rationalist” circles.”
Actually, what I’ve been thinking is “I should post controversial-by-Lesswrong-standards things more often.” This post has double the comments of any of my other posts.
See the ‘Help’ link at the bottom right of the comment box for explanations of the Markdown syntax used here. In particular, quote a paragraph by preceding it by “>”.
Thank you wedrifid! I have been wondering for weeks how people do that!