Consider that e.g. for all the Christians an irrefutable discovery that the whole Jesus thing was a fake and a hoax would count as an existential catastrophe.
This seems to conflate people’s values with their asserted values. Because of belief-in-belief and similar effects, we can’t assume those to be the same when modeling other people. We should also expect that people’s values are more complex than the values that they will assert (or even admit).
I had a college roommate who went through a phase where he wanted to die and go to heaven as soon as possible, but believed that committing suicide was a mortal sin.
So he would do dangerous things — like take walks in the middle of the (ill-lit, semi-rural) road from campus to town, wearing dark clothing, at night — to increase (or so he said) his chances of being accidentally killed.
Most Christians don’t do that sort of thing. Most Christians behave approximately as sensibly as *humanists do with regard to obvious risks to life. This suggests that they actually do possess values very similar to *humanist values, and that their assertions otherwise are tribal cheering.
(It may be that my roommate was just signaling extreme devotion in a misguided attempt to impress his crush, who was the leader of the college Christian club.)
Note that one can be a religious Christian and still act that way. Catholics consider taking deliberately risky behavior like that to itself be sinful for example.
This seems to conflate people’s values with their asserted values. Because of belief-in-belief and similar effects, we can’t assume those to be the same when modeling other people. We should also expect that people’s values are more complex than the values that they will assert (or even admit).
So replace “Christians” with “people who truly believe in the coming Day of Judgement and hope for eternal life”.
I had a college roommate who went through a phase where he wanted to die and go to heaven as soon as possible, but believed that committing suicide was a mortal sin.
So he would do dangerous things — like take walks in the middle of the (ill-lit, semi-rural) road from campus to town, wearing dark clothing, at night — to increase (or so he said) his chances of being accidentally killed.
Most Christians don’t do that sort of thing. Most Christians behave approximately as sensibly as *humanists do with regard to obvious risks to life. This suggests that they actually do possess values very similar to *humanist values, and that their assertions otherwise are tribal cheering.
(It may be that my roommate was just signaling extreme devotion in a misguided attempt to impress his crush, who was the leader of the college Christian club.)
Note that one can be a religious Christian and still act that way. Catholics consider taking deliberately risky behavior like that to itself be sinful for example.