# Seeking models of LW’s aversion to religion

Hi there. I’m a longtime LW-er posting under a pseudonym, in the hopes of being able to make my ignorance visible without unnecessary drama. Please don’t out me; it seems to me that the ability to expose one’s ignorance pseudonymously is a pro-epistemic norm that we’ll be better off having.

Now that I’ve gotten that over with:

I want to understand LW’s aversion to religion. I’m hoping some of you guys can help me model it. I’m also hoping to explain what is attractive to me about religion as an aid to forming accurate maps (including, attractive to me vis a vis my goal of making LW stronger/more successfully truth-seeking), and to see if some of you are willing and able to understand my perspective about this (“to pass my ITT,” is I think how you lot would say this?). I want to know whether, after you “pass my ITT,” you have anything to say back that makes me think my attraction to religion is something truth can destroy.

What is LW’s objection to religion?
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Here’s my starting attempt at describing LW’s aversion to religion:

1) Many religions claim things that are straightforwardly false (e.g., “Jesus physically rose from the dead.”) It’s harmful to believe false things.

2) Human beings have an observable tendency to really persistently believe (or [claim to believe](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/7gRSERQZbqTuLX5re/p/nYkMLFpx77Rz3uo9c)) some [obviously](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BcYBfG8KomcpcxkEg/crisis-of-faith) false things religions claim, compared to random obviously false things. This suggests to LW that religion is near a “fault line” in the human psyche, and if we go near that fault line our minds might start believing a lot of different false things, or might otherwise become less trustworthy. We don’t have a precise, high-confidence model of what exactly this “fault line” is, so it is safest to stay far away from religion, so as to reduce the odds of accidentally stumbling over the unknown “religion fault line” and having our minds go screwy.

If you’re a LW-er who is averse to religion, and you have a couple minutes to make me smarter, I’d really appreciate a comment below from you (or a PM) about whether this (1 and 2 above) summarizes most of what drives your aversion to religion, or whether it’s missing something core to your reaction.

How the above “objection to religion” sits with me
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Objection 1 seems valid and correct to me. I agree many religions claim many false things. Jesus did not physically rise from the dead; there was no message to Noah about a flood; etc. I also agree that false beliefs are often harmful, and that, as Eliezer argues, the resistance many religious people have to cryonics is a strong example of the false beliefs of religion causing important harm. I suspect my beliefs here are roughly that of many near the center of LW, although I may be missing something.

Objection 2 is more [confusing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SwCwG9wZcAzQtckwx/that-tiny-note-of-discord) to me. Objection 2, in my current understanding, is a special case of “don’t expose yourself to a potentially compelling set of perspectives, because if you do you might become convinced by them, and then you’ll believe something false.” I am afraid of heuristics following this template. I agree, of course, that it’s bad to end up believing something false. But exposing myself to all the perspectives, and allowing myself to think everything through after exposure to all arguments and perspectives, is usually a better heuristic than “avoid thinking about X” for figuring out what’s true. (Think creationists saying “don’t listen to biologists, they’ll trick you.”)

One place where I would be grateful for help: what exactly is the fault line near religion, if there is in fact a fault line there? The conjunction fallacy is in some sense a fault line in the human psyche, but it’s one we can name, can point to precisely, and can thereby become relatively immune to in the sense that one needn’t fear reading conjunctive futurism; one can simply read it, remember the conjunction fallacy, and try not to fall for the false parts. Is religion like this? Or is it a broader and more unknown set of fault lines that requires more caution? I would feel far better about the whole thing if we could make “watch out for religion” more similar to “watch out for the conjunction fallacy”: specific, verifiably a bias (or a set of biases), and sufficiently well characterized that, after training in recognizing the relevant biases, practicing religion (e.g. praying) would no longer much threaten a person's sanity.

Why, and in what sense, I find religion attractive
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To be clear, I do not find “belief in a literal Jehovah who literally raised Jesus from the dead” attractive. That religion would include false beliefs, and false beliefs are harmful and not attractive.

To describe what I do find attractive:

Religion seems to me to be better (though still not great) at giving folks accurate, usable models of where to trust our maps vs where to have humility, and at giving folks accurate maps of what the heck it is to be a human being, related to other human beings, in the middle of this here universe.

For example, when I contrast practitioners of most traditional religions (Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, various forms of traditional polytheistic religion, etc.) with most of those professing belief in what I’ll call “naive scientistic materialism,” it seems to me that the religious practitioners often do better in the following ways.

### Situating human life within temporal rhythms (daily/weekly, yearly, and across the lifetime). Honoring these rhythms communally.

Most religions situate human life within a set of rhythms, including daily and weekly rhythms (e.g. “don’t work on the Sabbath”); yearly rhythms (e.g. “here is when we celebrate the harvest; here is when we atone, fast, and make an empty space for seeing past our egos”); and lifetime rhythms (e.g. “here is when we recognize a young person as having come of age; here is a ritual for marriage; here is a ritual for death.”)

In contrast, many who profess what I’m calling “naive scientistic materialism” seem to me to eat, work, and sleep at all hours of the day and week in patterns that seem fairly unhealthy and unproductive to me. Many scientistic materialists seem to me to marry several times or not at all in patterns that I believe are less promoting of life, happiness, healthy children, and stable community than many traditional patterns; and to generally attempt to model themselves as rhythmless machines (“I just need to give my body 8 hours of sleep and 2,000 calories and then it ought to give me back the ability to do functional work”) in ways that seem to me to have inadequate respect for what I would call the sacred forces at work in the body, mind, and soul, and inadequate humility about our maps of the same.[^kgorurdwofe]

### Respect for folk ethics

Many religions claim that such things as courage, honesty, and hard work are virtues. (The specifics vary, but many religions claim something like that for some set of ‘traditional virtues.') In contrast, many scientistic materialists speak as though they have arbitrary personal preferences for e.g. courage or honesty as part of their arbitrary, purely individual, utility functions. (Eliezer admittedly [does](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yz2btSaCLHmLWgWD5/protected-from-myself) [better](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fG3g3764tSubr6xvs/the-meaning-of-right) here.)

I think it’s, roughly speaking, more accurate to say “courage is a virtue” than to say “I personally value courage.” I personally enjoy the flavor of caramel. “Courage is a virtue” is not similar to my relationship to caramel; it’s a prediction that practicing courage will generally help a person to create good things broadly, and to have a right alignment of their soul. “Courage is a virtue” is a sentence, not about my map, but [about the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GAR8gT3d9uCtr4kv8/does-your-morality-care-what-you-think).

Folk ethics seems to me to be of real use for building viable organizations and relationships, and for keeping your soul in good working order. I think scientistic young people are often more confused than their religious counterparts here, due to being given less accurate maps. (This matters more for teens and twenties than for older folks, since young people are forced for lack of experience to rely more on outside maps.)

### Encouragement to bear and raise children, and to attend to the next generation. Offering shared communal patterns that make this easier.

I suspect that religion (especially, communally practiced religion) makes it easier for people to create stable marriages and to raise children by providing shared maps of how to do this together. I suspect it also encourages more people to want these things by providing a more accurate map of their value, and a more accurate map of what kind of thing we humans are, such that we value children. (Again, providing accurate maps matters most for young people.)

Many scientistic materialists seem in my experience to have difficulty finding anything to care about, partly because they are trying to follow an inaccurate map that tells them that they have a “utility function” that is mostly about themselves and their experience. Or they have inaccurate maps that tell them that their “values” are a thing they get to just make up according to what they think will get them social status or something, and these maps are also stupid and leave them adrift. Or they realize these maps have errors because they [read the Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) but are still similarly adrift.

I suspect religion offers a more accurate map of the sense in which we are and are not isolated individuals, and of what matters to us deep down, and of at least some parts of how to live and orient given that.[^wuujk3nnk07]

The above list of places where religion seems to me to offer a more accurate map is not exhaustive; I am forcing myself to be brief. However, I believe it is representative.

In conclusion
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I love the way LW seeks true beliefs and eschews false ones (including e.g. “Jesus physically rose from the dead.”) I wish to protect this and to not mess with this.

In keeping with what I understand of LW's culture, I wish to investigate together the question of whether religion offers systematically more accurate maps of some important aspects of humankind's relationship to the universe, and to investigate whether this can be separated from religion’s admitted tendency to get stuck in specific false beliefs.

I wish also to investigate the question of whether there is some terrible epistemic booby trap near religion, such that I or others should fear religious practice.

I will be grateful for any assistance making more accurate maps of any of the above.

Thank you.  
 

[^kgorurdwofe]: To translate my use of the word “sacred,” here, into local parlance: our maps of the body are not the body. Our maps of the mind are not the mind. Our maps of the soul are not the soul (root word “breath” — I’m using “soul” to mean whatever it is that goes out of a person at the moment of death). Also: each of the body, mind, and soul come from living processes that are smart, that non-randomly try to bring about good things, and that deserve our “respect” in the sense of not expecting a reliable lack of backfire from micromanaging them. Furthermore, these processes grew up in the context of our historical relationship to e.g. nature, to foraging within a natural context that included daily and yearly rhythms, and to being in certain kinds of relationships to particular kinds of human communities, and I know no good reason to expect them to be robust to the total disruption of these relationships. When I regard these processes as “sacred,” I remind myself to look at them in a manner appropriate to looking at old, wise things that use patterns not in my map to produce value I am dependent on. 

[^wuujk3nnk07]: I realize that Eliezer got a lot of this right, but I know nobody else who found his writing on morality compelling (nor did it work on me), and I think this was because he did not situate it within a larger accurate map in the way religion does. (Though he tried.) My guess is that Eliezer got values as right as he did partly because he grew up around religious people, and that his Sequence on morality did not manage to reproduce the component mental moves he used to get there. I am interested in whether seeking accurate maps near religion can help us do better.