This smacks pretty strongly to me of undiscriminating skepticism. If you refuse to entertain the notion of a relevant difference between throwing people into Mount Fuji (not that there’s a lot to throw someone into)because you believe that a god demands it and throwing people into Mount Fuji out of a sense of retribution, are you going to entertain the notion of a difference between campaigning to stop an AI project because they always turn out badly in movies, and campaigning to stop it because you’ve got strong reason to believe it will FOOM into an Unfriendly AI? How about discriminating between people who want to be mummified so they’ll be whole in the afterlife, and people who want to be cryonically frozen? Or between the Rapture and the Singularity?
An action may be the same regardless of what motivated it, but different beliefs have different implications. They will change according to different evidence or reasoning, or when different belief nodes are switched (for example, a moderate Muslim’s actions may be changed by being convinced that the original intent captured in the Koran was for Islam to be spread by the sword, in a way that a non-Muslim’s absolutely won’t be.) And if you can’t discriminate between strange seeming actions by the actual reasons that motivated them, then you’re just going to end up judging according to your own adopted memes and cultural norms.
But if we make this one trivial change, turning Nazism into Thorism and making it a “religion,” which as we’ve seen need not change the magnitude or details of Nazi crimes at all, the acts of the Allies are a blatant act of religious intolerance.
Aren’t we supposed to respect other faiths?
It’s certainly convenient to do so when you can’t discriminate between differing beliefs on the basis of evidence. If you default to not respecting complex webs of belief unsupported by evidence, the problem goes away. But it certainly doesn’t require you to not recognize a subcategory of belief webs as “religious”.
This smacks pretty strongly to me of undiscriminating skepticism. If you refuse to entertain the notion of a relevant difference between throwing people into Mount Fuji (not that there’s a lot to throw someone into)because you believe that a god demands it and throwing people into Mount Fuji out of a sense of retribution, are you going to entertain the notion of a difference between campaigning to stop an AI project because they always turn out badly in movies, and campaigning to stop it because you’ve got strong reason to believe it will FOOM into an Unfriendly AI? How about discriminating between people who want to be mummified so they’ll be whole in the afterlife, and people who want to be cryonically frozen? Or between the Rapture and the Singularity?
An action may be the same regardless of what motivated it, but different beliefs have different implications. They will change according to different evidence or reasoning, or when different belief nodes are switched (for example, a moderate Muslim’s actions may be changed by being convinced that the original intent captured in the Koran was for Islam to be spread by the sword, in a way that a non-Muslim’s absolutely won’t be.) And if you can’t discriminate between strange seeming actions by the actual reasons that motivated them, then you’re just going to end up judging according to your own adopted memes and cultural norms.
It’s certainly convenient to do so when you can’t discriminate between differing beliefs on the basis of evidence. If you default to not respecting complex webs of belief unsupported by evidence, the problem goes away. But it certainly doesn’t require you to not recognize a subcategory of belief webs as “religious”.