But let’s follow your reasoning—and the analogy with Christianity—a bit further.
Christianity was founded around an aspiration: to be more Christian (defined as “do good works for strangers, loving and forgiving their enemies, and living lives of poverty and service”) than people who aren’t members.
They survived, and grew—very successfully.
Let us take the implication in your question for granted, and stipulate that the average Christian today is not more Christian than the average non-Christian.
The aspiration around which Christianity was founded, would seem to not have been attained.
By analogy, you propose to found a club around an aspiration: to be more rational than people who aren’t members of the club.
It seems plausible that, having done this, our club can successfully survive and grow.
However—assuming the pattern holds (and we have no particular reason to think that it won’t)—members of our club will not be more rational than non-members. Our aspiration will not have been attained.
In short, this reasoning seems to endorse the following trade-off: survive and grow by sacrificing your goals.
I think you might be overlooking the widespread cultural effects of Christian memes. When I had a similar discussion with a friend I argued “imagine a society in which the 12 Virtues had the place the 10 Commandments (or maybe the Beatitudes) do in ours”.
Not everyone or even most people actually _follow_ the 10 Commandments and it is debatable whether Christians follow them any more frequently than non-Christians but if you compare a ours to a society that had basically _never heard_ of the 10 Commandments I think it is hard to imagine that other society would have more Commandment-followers.
Christian memes are _absurdly_ pervasive in the Western canon to the point where historically even secularists conducted their intellectual discourse in Christian ideas.
Consider a world in which children’s literature is filled with rationalist ideas and Good Moral Teaching is all about being a good rationalist and even anti-rationalists have to define themselves on the terms of the rationalists in order to be an effective counter-movement and most people _know_ they’re supposed to Make Their Beliefs Pay Rent and Destroy What Can Be Destroyed By The Truth even if they don’t bother to actually do so most of the time.
I would expect this world to actually be more rational, on net, than our own. In fact, I think that if such a world is _not_ more rational then it is a damning indictment of group rationalism in general and possibly evidence that the whole affair to be a waste of energy.
I have a guess as to how this would actually evolve.
While the median Christian is not particularly Christian, there probably are a good number of pretty excellent Christians, whose motivation for being thus is their commitment to the ideals that they profess. So it’s possible—even likely—that Christianity actually makes the world a little bit more “in the image of Christ” on the margin.
If you have a billion Christians, the number of “actually pretty good” Christians is likely to be pretty high.
Right now we probably have barely thousands of Rationalists who would identify as such. An organized attempt at increasing that number, with a formal aspiration to be better rationalists, would increase the number of “actually pretty good” rationalists, although the median rationalist might just be somebody who read 4% of the Sequences and went to two meetups. But that would still be a win.
But let’s follow your reasoning—and the analogy with Christianity—a bit further.
Christianity was founded around an aspiration: to be more Christian (defined as “do good works for strangers, loving and forgiving their enemies, and living lives of poverty and service”) than people who aren’t members.
They survived, and grew—very successfully.
Let us take the implication in your question for granted, and stipulate that the average Christian today is not more Christian than the average non-Christian.
The aspiration around which Christianity was founded, would seem to not have been attained.
By analogy, you propose to found a club around an aspiration: to be more rational than people who aren’t members of the club.
It seems plausible that, having done this, our club can successfully survive and grow.
However—assuming the pattern holds (and we have no particular reason to think that it won’t)—members of our club will not be more rational than non-members. Our aspiration will not have been attained.
In short, this reasoning seems to endorse the following trade-off: survive and grow by sacrificing your goals.
Is that what you really want?
I think you might be overlooking the widespread cultural effects of Christian memes. When I had a similar discussion with a friend I argued “imagine a society in which the 12 Virtues had the place the 10 Commandments (or maybe the Beatitudes) do in ours”.
Not everyone or even most people actually _follow_ the 10 Commandments and it is debatable whether Christians follow them any more frequently than non-Christians but if you compare a ours to a society that had basically _never heard_ of the 10 Commandments I think it is hard to imagine that other society would have more Commandment-followers.
Christian memes are _absurdly_ pervasive in the Western canon to the point where historically even secularists conducted their intellectual discourse in Christian ideas.
Consider a world in which children’s literature is filled with rationalist ideas and Good Moral Teaching is all about being a good rationalist and even anti-rationalists have to define themselves on the terms of the rationalists in order to be an effective counter-movement and most people _know_ they’re supposed to Make Their Beliefs Pay Rent and Destroy What Can Be Destroyed By The Truth even if they don’t bother to actually do so most of the time.
I would expect this world to actually be more rational, on net, than our own. In fact, I think that if such a world is _not_ more rational then it is a damning indictment of group rationalism in general and possibly evidence that the whole affair to be a waste of energy.
I have a guess as to how this would actually evolve.
While the median Christian is not particularly Christian, there probably are a good number of pretty excellent Christians, whose motivation for being thus is their commitment to the ideals that they profess. So it’s possible—even likely—that Christianity actually makes the world a little bit more “in the image of Christ” on the margin.
If you have a billion Christians, the number of “actually pretty good” Christians is likely to be pretty high.
Right now we probably have barely thousands of Rationalists who would identify as such. An organized attempt at increasing that number, with a formal aspiration to be better rationalists, would increase the number of “actually pretty good” rationalists, although the median rationalist might just be somebody who read 4% of the Sequences and went to two meetups. But that would still be a win.