Perhaps the metaphysical beliefs aren’t that much important. They are almost always free-floating, not tied in any significant way to expectations and experiences, and serve as a group identification sign. (After all, it doesn’t seem to me that, say, Rand’s Objectivism is less explicit with its assumptions than Zoroastrianism. That ideologies don’t refer to gods doesn’t imply that they masquerade their basic beliefs.)
Let’s take your concrete example, which is a good case study for ideology in general.
Notice that Objectivism purports to be a product of pure rational thinking based on obviously true axioms, which will be accepted by anyone who is not ignorant or delusional, like some well-established result in mathematics or physics. In reality, however, dissecting the actual beliefs held by Objectivists reveals a whole rat’s nest of weird metaphysics—which is in fact the real content of their ideology, for which its purported derivation from pure logic and reason is just a masquerade.
With this in mind, even though I don’t know almost anything about Zoroastrianism, I would be surprised if its assumptions aren’t much more explicit than the real assumptions of Objectivism. Similar analysis can be applied to any ideology, including those that are nowadays popular enough that they commonly pass for sheer rationality and common sense. The danger is that these metaphysical beliefs masquerading as products of reason and common sense can easily motivate further beliefs and acts that clash with reality, sometimes quite severely. (In this sense, they aren’t free-floating.)
Or to put it in a different way, the question is ultimately about the importance of a specific common pattern in belief systems, namely postulating the existence of antropomorphic metaphysical entities. If one singles out religion as an especially problematic subset of the broader space of belief systems, this basically means that one’s heuristic for judging belief systems assigns an especially large negative weight to matching this pattern. The trouble is, over-focusing on this particular pattern can make one’s heuristic vulnerable to ideas and belief systems that can be quite awful even though they pass this particular test with flying colors.
The usual failure mode for passionate atheists and self-declared skeptics and free-thinkers is that they crank up their sensitivity to this pattern to eleven (along with some other patterns, such as conflict with established hard science), but their heuristics for judging ideas are otherwise very poor. This leads them to give pass to all sorts of horrible nonsense, or even to become active partisans of it.
I agree that non-religious ideologies have an advantage over religions in that they lack one clear sign of irrationality, thus being potentially more attractive for those who identify with reason and skepticism. (Religions may be, on the other hand, more attractive to believers in “spirituality” and whatever kind of self-identified opponents of rationality; it’s far from clear what group is larger and thus whether religions are more or less dangerous—measured by their propagation potential—than non-religious ideologies.) Specifically, you are right that most self-reported skeptics aren’t well prepared to tackle ideologies that don’t openly contradict science.
On the other hand, formulating it as a matter of explicit or masqueraded metaphysical assumptions suggests that the ideologies in question have assumptions in the first place—that is, that they have a fairly rigorous logical structure based on few starting axioms, which are stated openly in case of religions while being falsely pretended to be derived from some common-sensical truths in case of secular ideologies. I think a better model is that most ideological / religious beliefs are more or less arbitrary; when they are presented as being derived from some assumption, almost always the derivation is a non sequitur. Consider Christianity as an example: there is long tradition of theological inquiry based on assumption that truths about God can be revealed by reason (at least in Catholicism, that may not be true for other denominations), but in fact even if you accept the truth of whole Bible as a metaphysical assumptions (a fairly large axiom set, in fact), you can hardly derive truth of e.g. trinitarianism therefrom. (By “derive” I mean using arguments acceptable to human audience; of course from a formally logical point of view, you can derive anything from the Bible using the principle of explosion.) This is also true for many of the historically most harmful beliefs tied to Christianity, such as Antisemitism, beliefs in witchcraft, or generally, beliefs in moral permissibility of converting non-believers and heretics by force. These beliefs don’t follow from explicit Christian assumptions but were once widely shared by most of the Christian community; if we are going to call Randian non sequiturs “masqueraded assumptions”, we would rather call the mentioned Christian beliefs the same name.
Specifically, you are right that most self-reported skeptics aren’t well prepared to tackle ideologies that don’t openly contradict science.
There is also a particularly severe failure mode, which occurs when non-religious ideologies clash with ones that claim (some degree of) religious inspiration, and the views of the latter on practical matters are less bad by any reasonable standard. This may happen if the non-religious ideology purports to have rational and scientific answers, which are however just rationalization and pseudoscience, and as such severely delusional. At the same time, the views of the pro-religious ideology may use the religious stuff mainly to support some sort of traditionalist pro-status quo position, which may have many problems, but is at least unlikely to be downright crazy.
In this situation, people whose approach to evaluating ideas is excessively focused on anti-religious hostility may end up siding with the former—which means that they are, for all practical purposes, supporting the crazier side.
I think this pattern has in fact been quite common in recent history. To take a remote and hopefully uncontroversial example, imagine living in some country circa 1930 in which the main contestants for power are Communists and, say, Catholic conservatives—and while the latter side may be problematic in all sorts of ways, it still offers something within the bounds of livable normality, unlike the former. (And indeed, observe how many intellectuals who would scoff at religious people have historically advocated Marxism and similar recipe-for-disaster ideologies.) I think contemporary instances of the same pattern could also be found, although these are of course likely to be extremely controversial.
I think a better model is that most ideological / religious beliefs are more or less arbitrary; when they are presented as being derived from some assumption, almost always the derivation is a non sequitur. Consider Christianity as an example: there is long tradition of theological inquiry based on assumption that truths about God can be revealed by reason (at least in Catholicism, that may not be true for other denominations), but in fact even if you accept the truth of whole Bible as a metaphysical assumptions (a fairly large axiom set, in fact), you can hardly derive truth of e.g. trinitarianism therefrom. [...] These beliefs don’t follow from explicit Christian assumptions but were once widely shared by most of the Christian community; if we are going to call Randian non sequiturs “masqueraded assumptions”, we would rather call the mentioned Christian beliefs the same name.
That’s a valid point. Every religion also has some such “masqueraded assumptions,” in some cases to a very large degree. (Here there is some contrast between religions that insist they’re based on straightforward readings of holy texts versus those that admit the role of extra-scriptural tradition, thus, in a sense, explicitly legitimizing some of their “masqueraded assumptions.”)
The contrast with non-religious ideologies, however, is that for them the “masqueraded assumptions” are fundamentally different from what these ideologies purport to be, i.e. products of reason. An ideology presents itself as sheer common sense, sometimes even a scientific truth, but under that masquerade there is a whole mess of irrational and illogical beliefs that form its actual content. We don’t see any such striking and tremendously relevant contrast when it comes to, say, those parts of the Baptists’ beliefs that are really based on a straightforward reading the Bible and those that only purport to be such.
Let’s take your concrete example, which is a good case study for ideology in general.
Notice that Objectivism purports to be a product of pure rational thinking based on obviously true axioms, which will be accepted by anyone who is not ignorant or delusional, like some well-established result in mathematics or physics. In reality, however, dissecting the actual beliefs held by Objectivists reveals a whole rat’s nest of weird metaphysics—which is in fact the real content of their ideology, for which its purported derivation from pure logic and reason is just a masquerade.
With this in mind, even though I don’t know almost anything about Zoroastrianism, I would be surprised if its assumptions aren’t much more explicit than the real assumptions of Objectivism. Similar analysis can be applied to any ideology, including those that are nowadays popular enough that they commonly pass for sheer rationality and common sense. The danger is that these metaphysical beliefs masquerading as products of reason and common sense can easily motivate further beliefs and acts that clash with reality, sometimes quite severely. (In this sense, they aren’t free-floating.)
Or to put it in a different way, the question is ultimately about the importance of a specific common pattern in belief systems, namely postulating the existence of antropomorphic metaphysical entities. If one singles out religion as an especially problematic subset of the broader space of belief systems, this basically means that one’s heuristic for judging belief systems assigns an especially large negative weight to matching this pattern. The trouble is, over-focusing on this particular pattern can make one’s heuristic vulnerable to ideas and belief systems that can be quite awful even though they pass this particular test with flying colors.
The usual failure mode for passionate atheists and self-declared skeptics and free-thinkers is that they crank up their sensitivity to this pattern to eleven (along with some other patterns, such as conflict with established hard science), but their heuristics for judging ideas are otherwise very poor. This leads them to give pass to all sorts of horrible nonsense, or even to become active partisans of it.
I agree that non-religious ideologies have an advantage over religions in that they lack one clear sign of irrationality, thus being potentially more attractive for those who identify with reason and skepticism. (Religions may be, on the other hand, more attractive to believers in “spirituality” and whatever kind of self-identified opponents of rationality; it’s far from clear what group is larger and thus whether religions are more or less dangerous—measured by their propagation potential—than non-religious ideologies.) Specifically, you are right that most self-reported skeptics aren’t well prepared to tackle ideologies that don’t openly contradict science.
On the other hand, formulating it as a matter of explicit or masqueraded metaphysical assumptions suggests that the ideologies in question have assumptions in the first place—that is, that they have a fairly rigorous logical structure based on few starting axioms, which are stated openly in case of religions while being falsely pretended to be derived from some common-sensical truths in case of secular ideologies. I think a better model is that most ideological / religious beliefs are more or less arbitrary; when they are presented as being derived from some assumption, almost always the derivation is a non sequitur. Consider Christianity as an example: there is long tradition of theological inquiry based on assumption that truths about God can be revealed by reason (at least in Catholicism, that may not be true for other denominations), but in fact even if you accept the truth of whole Bible as a metaphysical assumptions (a fairly large axiom set, in fact), you can hardly derive truth of e.g. trinitarianism therefrom. (By “derive” I mean using arguments acceptable to human audience; of course from a formally logical point of view, you can derive anything from the Bible using the principle of explosion.) This is also true for many of the historically most harmful beliefs tied to Christianity, such as Antisemitism, beliefs in witchcraft, or generally, beliefs in moral permissibility of converting non-believers and heretics by force. These beliefs don’t follow from explicit Christian assumptions but were once widely shared by most of the Christian community; if we are going to call Randian non sequiturs “masqueraded assumptions”, we would rather call the mentioned Christian beliefs the same name.
There is also a particularly severe failure mode, which occurs when non-religious ideologies clash with ones that claim (some degree of) religious inspiration, and the views of the latter on practical matters are less bad by any reasonable standard. This may happen if the non-religious ideology purports to have rational and scientific answers, which are however just rationalization and pseudoscience, and as such severely delusional. At the same time, the views of the pro-religious ideology may use the religious stuff mainly to support some sort of traditionalist pro-status quo position, which may have many problems, but is at least unlikely to be downright crazy.
In this situation, people whose approach to evaluating ideas is excessively focused on anti-religious hostility may end up siding with the former—which means that they are, for all practical purposes, supporting the crazier side.
I think this pattern has in fact been quite common in recent history. To take a remote and hopefully uncontroversial example, imagine living in some country circa 1930 in which the main contestants for power are Communists and, say, Catholic conservatives—and while the latter side may be problematic in all sorts of ways, it still offers something within the bounds of livable normality, unlike the former. (And indeed, observe how many intellectuals who would scoff at religious people have historically advocated Marxism and similar recipe-for-disaster ideologies.) I think contemporary instances of the same pattern could also be found, although these are of course likely to be extremely controversial.
That’s a valid point. Every religion also has some such “masqueraded assumptions,” in some cases to a very large degree. (Here there is some contrast between religions that insist they’re based on straightforward readings of holy texts versus those that admit the role of extra-scriptural tradition, thus, in a sense, explicitly legitimizing some of their “masqueraded assumptions.”)
The contrast with non-religious ideologies, however, is that for them the “masqueraded assumptions” are fundamentally different from what these ideologies purport to be, i.e. products of reason. An ideology presents itself as sheer common sense, sometimes even a scientific truth, but under that masquerade there is a whole mess of irrational and illogical beliefs that form its actual content. We don’t see any such striking and tremendously relevant contrast when it comes to, say, those parts of the Baptists’ beliefs that are really based on a straightforward reading the Bible and those that only purport to be such.
Comment test—please ignore.
Comment test—please ignore.
Comment test—please ignore.