However, I do not think that the purpose of lesswrong is served by engaging with religious ideology here,
I didn’t say we should engage with it! I was still speaking within the context of barbs at religion at the Solstice. I agree we should continue to reject (epistemically unsound versions of) religion, just not also be needlessly hostile to it in contexts where it could be avoided with some small tweaks and without compromising on any principles.
Why does this suggest to you that the community needs to be less hostile to religion, instead of more or roughly the same amount?
Usually if a group signals hostility to X and some X-people are thick-skinned enough to participate anyway, there’ll be a much greater number of X-people who are less thick-skinned and decide to stay out. Even if the X-people could make good contributions, as they empirically can.
And if their contributions are bad, they’ll just be downvoted on their own (lack of) merits, the same as any other bad post.
I didn’t say we should engage with it! I was still speaking within the context of barbs at religion at the Solstice. I agree we should continue to reject (epistemically unsound versions of) religion, just not also be needlessly hostile to it in contexts where it could be avoided with some small tweaks and without compromising on any principles.
Usually if a group signals hostility to X and some X-people are thick-skinned enough to participate anyway, there’ll be a much greater number of X-people who are less thick-skinned and decide to stay out. Even if the X-people could make good contributions, as they empirically can.
And if their contributions are bad, they’ll just be downvoted on their own (lack of) merits, the same as any other bad post.