You can justify all sorts of spiritual ideas by a few arguments:
They’re instrumentally useful in producing good feelings between people.
They help you escape the typical mind fallacy.
They’re memetically refined, which means they’ll fit better with your intuition than, say, trying to guess where the people you know fit on the OCEAN scale.
They’re provocative and generative of conversation in a way that scientific studies aren’t. Partly that’s because the language they’re wrapped in is more intriguing, and partly isn’t because everybody’s on a level playing field.
It’s a way to escape the trap of intelligence-signalling and lowers the barrier for verbalizing creative ideas. If you’re able to talk about astrology, it lets people feel like they have permission to babble.
They’re aesthetically pleasing if you don’t take them too seriously
I would be interested in arguments about why we should eschew them that don’t resort to activist ideas of making the world a “better place” by purging the world of irrationality and getting everybody on board with a more scientific framework for understanding social reality or psychology.
I’m more interested in why individual people should anticipate that exploring these spiritual frameworks will make their lives worse, either hedonistically or by some reasonable moral framework. Is there a deontological or utilitarian argument against them?
You can justify all sorts of spiritual ideas by a few arguments:
They’re instrumentally useful in producing good feelings between people.
They help you escape the typical mind fallacy.
They’re memetically refined, which means they’ll fit better with your intuition than, say, trying to guess where the people you know fit on the OCEAN scale.
They’re provocative and generative of conversation in a way that scientific studies aren’t. Partly that’s because the language they’re wrapped in is more intriguing, and partly isn’t because everybody’s on a level playing field.
It’s a way to escape the trap of intelligence-signalling and lowers the barrier for verbalizing creative ideas. If you’re able to talk about astrology, it lets people feel like they have permission to babble.
They’re aesthetically pleasing if you don’t take them too seriously
I would be interested in arguments about why we should eschew them that don’t resort to activist ideas of making the world a “better place” by purging the world of irrationality and getting everybody on board with a more scientific framework for understanding social reality or psychology.
I’m more interested in why individual people should anticipate that exploring these spiritual frameworks will make their lives worse, either hedonistically or by some reasonable moral framework. Is there a deontological or utilitarian argument against them?