This argument primarily comes down to arguing that because a certain category has blurry boundaries that we shouldn’t use it. This confuses having blurry boundaries with being useful.
The problem is not with the category having blurry boundaries, but with the fact that it (arguably) leads to grossly miscalibrated heuristics for evaluating beliefs. Such bad heuristics then end up being not just widely used by individuals, but also built into the system of government.
There is one especially common pattern in ideological disputes where such heuristics can be catastrophically bad. Suppose side A in a dispute claims a religious basis for its beliefs, which are however not derived from the religious axioms in some strict logical manner, but in fact the religious stuff serves only as the supporting narrative for what is just accumulated conventional wisdom and tradition. Suppose then that the opposing side B claims that its beliefs are a product of pure rational thinking, whereas in reality their supposed “rational thinking” or even “science” is a mere rationalization for their ideology—which is, at bottom, just another collection of human biases and metaphysical beliefs, although the latter are not about any anthropomorphic entities.
In situations of this sort, it is not at all unusual that the beliefs of the side A about practical issues are in fact reasonably close to reality, while the beliefs of the group B are grossly delusional and incredibly destructive if applied in practice. But the “religion” heuristic can make a wannabe rational thinker side with B for the ultimately silly reason that their metaphysics doesn’t involve anthropomorphic entities. (Even if the entities it does postulate are just as fictitious, the resulting reasoning equally fallacious, and the ultimate practical implications far crazier.)
Now, of course, contemporary examples of this pattern are likely to be ideologically charged to an extreme degree. But for a distant and hopefully uncontroversial example, imagine living in some country circa 1930 where there is an ongoing struggle for power between, say, some run-of-the-mill Christian conservatives and Communists. The religion heuristic might tell you that the latter, whatever their faults, are at least attempting to base their worldview on rational thinking, so they can’t possibly be the worse choice—even though they are in fact, by any reasonable measure, the more insane side by orders of magnitude. (And unsurprisingly, around that time plenty of purported rational thinkers did end up supporting the crazier side in disputes of this sort.)
Also, to end this comment on a more controversial note, what I find really scary is that the modern “separation of church and state” principle, which uses the “religion” heuristic for determining who is allowed to influence the workings of the government, is actively selecting for ideologies that are most adept at hiding their metaphysics below layers of purportedly pure rational (or even “scientific”) thinking. While this is admittedly a controversial view, it seems to me that these are quite possibly the most dangerous sorts of delusions.
The problem is not with the category having blurry boundaries, but with the fact that it (arguably) leads to grossly miscalibrated heuristics for evaluating beliefs. Such bad heuristics then end up being not just widely used by individuals, but also built into the system of government.
There is one especially common pattern in ideological disputes where such heuristics can be catastrophically bad. Suppose side A in a dispute claims a religious basis for its beliefs, which are however not derived from the religious axioms in some strict logical manner, but in fact the religious stuff serves only as the supporting narrative for what is just accumulated conventional wisdom and tradition. Suppose then that the opposing side B claims that its beliefs are a product of pure rational thinking, whereas in reality their supposed “rational thinking” or even “science” is a mere rationalization for their ideology—which is, at bottom, just another collection of human biases and metaphysical beliefs, although the latter are not about any anthropomorphic entities.
In situations of this sort, it is not at all unusual that the beliefs of the side A about practical issues are in fact reasonably close to reality, while the beliefs of the group B are grossly delusional and incredibly destructive if applied in practice. But the “religion” heuristic can make a wannabe rational thinker side with B for the ultimately silly reason that their metaphysics doesn’t involve anthropomorphic entities. (Even if the entities it does postulate are just as fictitious, the resulting reasoning equally fallacious, and the ultimate practical implications far crazier.)
Now, of course, contemporary examples of this pattern are likely to be ideologically charged to an extreme degree. But for a distant and hopefully uncontroversial example, imagine living in some country circa 1930 where there is an ongoing struggle for power between, say, some run-of-the-mill Christian conservatives and Communists. The religion heuristic might tell you that the latter, whatever their faults, are at least attempting to base their worldview on rational thinking, so they can’t possibly be the worse choice—even though they are in fact, by any reasonable measure, the more insane side by orders of magnitude. (And unsurprisingly, around that time plenty of purported rational thinkers did end up supporting the crazier side in disputes of this sort.)
Also, to end this comment on a more controversial note, what I find really scary is that the modern “separation of church and state” principle, which uses the “religion” heuristic for determining who is allowed to influence the workings of the government, is actively selecting for ideologies that are most adept at hiding their metaphysics below layers of purportedly pure rational (or even “scientific”) thinking. While this is admittedly a controversial view, it seems to me that these are quite possibly the most dangerous sorts of delusions.