The community has a carefully cultivated culture that makes it a kind of sanctuary from the rest of the world where rationalists can exchange ideas without reestablishing foundational concepts and repeating familiar arguments (along with many other advantages).
and this bit
The examples you point to do not demonstrate hostility towards religious people, they demonstrate hostility towards religion. This is as appropriate here as hostility towards factory farming is at a vegan group. [...] Lesswrong hates religion in the way that lipids hate water.
are I think conflating rejection of religion and hostility to religion. There are plenty of contexts where it’s expected for people to follow one set of norms rather than another: if I want to publish in a physics journal, it’s expected that I follow the established research conventions and concepts of physics rather than, say, philosophy. And vice versa. Each field rejects the norms of the other—but this can be done without papers published in either field having random barbs against the other field.
One can reject religion without hostility to it, just as physics rejects the norms of philosophy without being hostile to it.
I’m also skeptical of the claim that the examples demonstrate hostility toward religion rather than religious people—tribal instincts are tribal instincts, and do not make such fine-grained distinctions. The “Brighter Than Today” bit is a pretty clear example: the people who want to silence the Prometheus are religious. As the OP points out, there’s no strong reason to expect prehistoric religions to act that way. (E.g. what we know of ancient religions is that they were mostly practical with doctrine derived from what worked, instead of practice being derived from doctrine.) So what’s that line doing in the song? Well, there’s a pretty obvious line of reasoning that would have created it: a thought along the lines of “well religious people are nasty and conservative, so probably they would also have opposed the invention of fire...”.
Even if that wasn’t the original generator, it’s still implicitly spreading that kind of message. I think that’s generally bad, because tribal instincts worsen people’s reasoning, so anything that feeds into them (including subtle barbs at outgroups) would generally be better off avoided.
I also somewhat disagree with this bit:
Lesswrong hates religion in the way that lipids hate water.
I’d say this is roughly accurate for religions that require belief in things without evidence. There’s a range of religions that don’t require that, I think including some mysticism/practice-based (rather than belief-based) versions of Christianity that make no strong claims about what God is, and allow for God to be interpreted in an abstract/metaphorical way while being based on evidence of the form “if you do these practices, you are likely to experience these kinds of effects”.
The distinctions you’re pointing out are subtle enough that it may be better to ask people instead of trying to infer their beliefs from such a noisy signal. I reject painting religious people as uniformly or even typically villainous, but it is probably fine to share a common frustration with some religions and religious institutions shutting down new ideas. I was not at secular solstice so I can’t say for sure which better describes it, but based on the examples given the former seems at least as accurate.
This bit
and this bit
are I think conflating rejection of religion and hostility to religion. There are plenty of contexts where it’s expected for people to follow one set of norms rather than another: if I want to publish in a physics journal, it’s expected that I follow the established research conventions and concepts of physics rather than, say, philosophy. And vice versa. Each field rejects the norms of the other—but this can be done without papers published in either field having random barbs against the other field.
One can reject religion without hostility to it, just as physics rejects the norms of philosophy without being hostile to it.
I’m also skeptical of the claim that the examples demonstrate hostility toward religion rather than religious people—tribal instincts are tribal instincts, and do not make such fine-grained distinctions. The “Brighter Than Today” bit is a pretty clear example: the people who want to silence the Prometheus are religious. As the OP points out, there’s no strong reason to expect prehistoric religions to act that way. (E.g. what we know of ancient religions is that they were mostly practical with doctrine derived from what worked, instead of practice being derived from doctrine.) So what’s that line doing in the song? Well, there’s a pretty obvious line of reasoning that would have created it: a thought along the lines of “well religious people are nasty and conservative, so probably they would also have opposed the invention of fire...”.
Even if that wasn’t the original generator, it’s still implicitly spreading that kind of message. I think that’s generally bad, because tribal instincts worsen people’s reasoning, so anything that feeds into them (including subtle barbs at outgroups) would generally be better off avoided.
I also somewhat disagree with this bit:
I’d say this is roughly accurate for religions that require belief in things without evidence. There’s a range of religions that don’t require that, I think including some mysticism/practice-based (rather than belief-based) versions of Christianity that make no strong claims about what God is, and allow for God to be interpreted in an abstract/metaphorical way while being based on evidence of the form “if you do these practices, you are likely to experience these kinds of effects”.
The distinctions you’re pointing out are subtle enough that it may be better to ask people instead of trying to infer their beliefs from such a noisy signal. I reject painting religious people as uniformly or even typically villainous, but it is probably fine to share a common frustration with some religions and religious institutions shutting down new ideas. I was not at secular solstice so I can’t say for sure which better describes it, but based on the examples given the former seems at least as accurate.