Tracing Woodgrains is having the same rationalist conversation that I was having in 2007 now in 2024. It went nowhere then. It will continue to go nowhere in the future. This is because the perspective studiously avoids the real questions at the heart of the problem. We need to get past this.
Secular religion is an oxymoron by definition. This would be like saying I’m waiting for a triangle to have 4 sides or I’m waiting for the sun to come out during night time. What you claim you are looking for is true religion, which is something different than “secular religion” which is just wanting to live a modern lifestyle that isn’t nihilistic
But the problem is he doesn't believe in the supernatural stuff that's at the center of religion. Is he supposed to brainwash himself into believing it so he can get the social and emotional benefits of religion?
Jul 16·edited Jul 16Liked by Jeff Giesea, TracingWoodgrains
Well, yeah, he's going to have to do that regardless. He's doing it even now. No matter what secular religion, no matter what version of "mormonism except the parts I don't like" comes about, it will require a supernatural, emotional, spiritual claim; something powerful enough to bring people together. And only after will an attempt be made to try to justify through a rational perspective.
This strikes me as convenient for people but untrue in the ways that matter. There's a major difference between accepting, say, "Joseph Smith was a prophet of God who found ancient records buried in a hill" and eg "The human project is worth continuing." The only way to properly equate claims like those is by drawing an untenably large boundary for the term "supernatural" that wholly elides the problem people have with accepting the supernatural to begin with.
It's trivially true that reason is the servant of the passions, but "you need a moral core before you can reason towards how it should be pursued" looks very different to "you need to accept false claims about the world before you can bring people together." The latter looks clearly untrue from my angle and I'm wholly unpersuaded by attempts to equate them.
I'm not stating "the human project is worth continuing" is a supernatural claim, hence why I mentioned emotional or spiritual claims too. But I do question whether it's a powerful enough idea, if it inspires great enough commitment, to bring people together long enough to actually continue that project in a productive way. Considering the evidence thus far, this is doubtful!
And I would rephrase your last paragraph thusly: "no matter your moral core, you're not going to arrive at it rationally."
You did mention emotional claims, but you did so aiming to contradict someone who pointed out I don't believe in the supernatural element and am not inclined to fake belief in it. Supernatural claims and including an emotional/moral core in your belief system are very, very different. You can't, or shouldn't, excuse the one by appealing to the other. If your response is that I should accept the supernatural because I already accept that morality is not purely rational, you've elided the whole disagreement, taking a trivial premise and extrapolating outwards to a wild conclusion.
We have at least three models of powerful secular religions, two broadly negative and one broadly positive: traditional Marxism, social justice progressivism, and Effective Altruism. Each of them inspires extraordinary commitment from its followers and has led to large-scale organization (the third less so than the former two, but it's also much younger). More broadly, larger and larger portions of our collective societal/moral frame have been contributed by people who reject the supernatural, including more and more load-bearing ones.
It is only appropriate that as the inaccuracy of supernatural claims becomes more and more apparent, people work to build serious systems without them. In my eyes, for someone with sufficient understanding to reject the supernatural to retreat back to it rather than building with what they've been given amounts to intellectual cowardice—a sense that they cannot possibly use a frame rooted in truth to accomplish what others managed with frames rooted in falsehood. I reject that wholeheartedly.
"If your response is that I should accept the supernatural because I already accept that morality is not purely rational"
No, my original response was simply to remind the other poster that none of us is rational and that everyone accepts claims that aren't rational in order to have a moral core. That much you accept as well.
If I'm rolling my eyes, it's at rationalist attempts I've encountered, like effective altruism, that pretend that's not the case.
That the claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are outrageous, supernatural and much larger in scope compared to effective altruism is of course true and to me at least, kind of the point. And the intellectual cowardice is, in my mind, the rejection of all supernatural.
"More broadly, larger and larger portions of our collective societal/moral frame have been contributed by people who reject the supernatural, including more and more load-bearing ones." Time will tell if this is a good thing. I'm personally not optimistic.
Naming those three things as "secular religions" gives the term an absolutely abysmal track record. Even "effective altruism" is mostly just a bunch of autists jerking each other off online. Is there an "effective altruist" church where I can take my wife and kids in confidence that it will provide a nurturing environment for my family? No, there isn't, and there isn't likely to be because "effective altruists" are too busy worrying about nonsense like "AI risk" to bother building anything like that.
Frankly I can't think of any better argument *against* secular religions than to provide these things as case studies of what they look like.
Here’s the problem with the way modern people talk about “religion.” They buy into Enlightenment premises. They say oh well religion is this private thing some people choose to believe with no rational basis. That’s the complete opposite of how religion was viewed for thousands of years. Religion is based on truth, not on pragmatism. And if you have a pragmatic religion, it will die because no one ACTUALLY believes it. We all need to purge this thinking. Now this is hard for Mormons in particular because Mormonism is a modern pragmatic religion whose end goal is basically to be a nice citizen. However if you want to find true religion you need to look into deeper and older philosophy and thinking, which many are starting to do rather than invent some secular BS to inspire people because at the end of the day, fear of death will kill any secular belief system as it did with old pagan systems.
"Deeper and older philosophy and thinking" is a good starting point, but I don't particularly buy into wisdom of the ancients as a generalized approach. We've been growing closer to the truth, not further, over time.
What’s your basis for the claim “we have been growing closer to truth?” In a day and age where we trans kids and our IQ is declining year over year you’re going to have to cite your sources. Also your article was actually really solid, but again you went back to Enlightenment thinking on religion. Religion not just something you believe really hard, that presupposes that you can’t arrive at true beliefs. Religion is giving God what He is owed. Our current civil rights John Lennon regime isn’t religious, it’s idolatry of the autonomy of the self over all other bonds.
Sure, but which God? Yours, I'm afraid, I am not convinced by.
As for increasing proximity to truth, scientific and technological progress has broadly all pointed one direction. Cultural progress is more mixed, doesn't track "truth" the same way, and in some ways has never been quite on track since World War I, but I'm grateful to be able to be in a gay interracial marriage without societal sanction, for example.
It is because I grew up rooted in tradition that I can confidently reject appeals to an idealized past. There are problems now; there were problems then. We can and must build to the future. https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1789336604013683196
Yes but those aren’t good arguments. Saying science has gotten better doesn’t actually mean we’ve gained a better understanding of the world. All mainstream western academies say men can become women and many of them argue science is a Western construct. Does that sound like a society that has better understanding and has progressed? And even if you want to talk about science, it’s just an abstraction of the real world, not actually the real world. Saying we have a better understanding now is like saying oh well we have metal detectors now that give us precise measurements so we have a better understanding of what metal is. That’s simply just not true. As for societal progress, many people would argue that there’s no such thing as a “same sex marriage” and that “gay” is as fictional identity as a “trans man” so again none of these are really sound arguments. If you want to rail on religion you’re going to need to understand what you are railing against rather than just appeal to strawmen
> In movements, as in nature: Adapt, migrate, or die.
This is not an original creed. It was the creed of the late 19th/early 20th century Futurian Technocrats. In order to adept they sought to treat the world as one giant factory and people as mere components of machines. They ended up providing the ideology to the great 20th century Totalitarian states.
You wrote:
> I'm not going to throw myself into a project and a culture worse than the one I left behind.
Seems to me like you already have. You've thrown yourself into a project that's not just worse than what you left behind but one whose results are downright dystopian.
For someone in your position the first step is to realize that what you think of as "materialism" is incoherent and what you think of as the "supernatural" does in fact exist.
"Giving God what He is owed" is sort of begging the question if you insist on it in absence of actually proving that God exists and that some particular conception of what He is owed is actually correct. It's the same sort of illogic as is found in some of the modern secular religions you dislike, where they start off axiomatically with statements like "Trans Women Are Women" and consider it blasphemy to actually demand evidence of it.
When you have the proper understanding of words you realize that “secular religion” makes no sense. And yes I believe the proper definition is giving God what He is owed because God is provable solely through reason as Vatican I states. Now you can ask why that is but you’ll have to study philosophy to understand these things rather than just say “I’m modern I know better.”
And since I don't believe in the truth of religion, there's no way to argue me into becoming religious through appeals to authority, morality, social science, history, or anything else other than a direct proof of the supernatural alleged facts that religion is based upon (a different set of them for each religion).
Again this is a very modern view of religion. You can investigate supernatural alleged facts of Catholicism (Eucharistic miracles, Shroud of Turin, Marian Apparitions, Demonic possessions) and find them all very convincing, however those are called “motives of credibility” rather than proofs of the faith. Proofs of Gods existence are about philosophy that are indisputable which is why in the West they reigned for thousands of years. You’ll have to get into philosophy to see the truth of religion.
I don't think anything short of a frontal lobotomy would stop my mind from taking a modern view of things, if that means caring about facts, logic, and evidence instead of ineffable feelings.
One problem (among many) with all the talk of replacing religion is that no one ever seems to discuss what its hierarchy should be based on. In the church, you have a priest who is the clear leader of the flock. The congregation submits to his wisdom and follows him in practicing the faith. As a basic form of human social organization, any serious attempt at a replacement must either copy this structure or at least explain what its alternative structure will be and why.
Who will the priests of a hypothetical "secular religion" be? Why will people follow them and submit to them as leaders? In the church, the hierarchy works specifically because the congregation accepts that there is a higher truth which lies outside of themselves and to which they are submitting--they are granting that there is something else out there which knows better than they do and they are willing to follow it. Whenever I hear discussions like this one, or read about Malcolm and Simone Collins, this element is completely absent. Instead, as rationalists their basic conception of the world is the opposite of this--that they individually know better than the church.
It thus seems extremely unlikely that such people would have any possibility of re-creating the sort of hierarchy that is necessary for something like a church to function. The second that any of them have even a small disagreement about anything, the entire enterprise would collapse, assuming that they could ever agree on enough to get it started in the first place.
Given the number of companies that exist, “clear hierarchical organization is impossible or implausible in secular orders” isn’t a viable claim, so perhaps the concern is specific to morality-focused secular orders? Even there, plenty of organizations have solved this locally. Authority doesn’t need to come from the divine; it can be as simple as “this is the person who made this organization and has the will to keep it going.”
>Given the number of companies that exist, “clear hierarchical organization is impossible or implausible in secular orders” isn’t a viable claim, so perhaps the concern is specific to morality-focused secular orders?<
Yes, obviously we are talking about morality-focused orders here. A corporation also has a clear organizing principle, the profit margin. Likewise in a corporation *everyone gets paid*, whereas you explicitly talk about the need for "volunteerism."
>Even there, plenty of organizations have solved this locally.<
Such as? If the institutions you are seeking already exist, why aren't you simply pointing people to them, instead of talking about the need to form them?
>Authority doesn’t need to come from the divine; it can be as simple as “this is the person who made this organization and has the will to keep it going.”<
Yes, every now and then a group of people organized around a single leader's ego will come along, we usually call those cults. "Trust me bro I'm awesome" is a *terrible* pitch for why people should put skin in your game. If you want an institution that scales and persists to any degree at all, you obviously need to do better than that. Likewise you need to give people some kind of higher principle or value-set in order to motivate them to engage in selfless behavior such as volunteering. "Do it because I think you should" clearly won't cut it.
Why not point people to them? Because I disagree with the specifics of social justice progressivism and Effective Altruism, of course. I’m not looking for A Secular Religion, I’m looking for a structure that aligns with my values.
The theory would be that people already share those values. For instance, a community of "gay couples" who are having "children" in the way that Tracing plans to, coming together over the shared value of raising their "families." Obviously, reality suggests that this does not work in practice, people simply don't show up for it once they've learned to think of themselves as the ultimate authority, as sovereign individuals who are beholden to nothing.
The intellectually honest position would be that giving up on religion will necessarily sacrifice some degree of social cohesion but that it's overall worth it so that we can have nice things like "gay marriage." This is the pattern you can observe in basically every single advanced society, certainly every white liberal society at least. But again, obviously, the people who understand themselves to be on the "winning" side of that trade don't want to say that out loud. They want to find a way to assure the losers that no, somehow we're all winners, and you can be too if you just quit with all that pesky talk about God already.
Strongly identify with what Trace says here about identifying with your pseudonym... most of my significant relations met me as Walt, which at this point feels a lot more palpably "me" than my actual name. Instead of doxxing myself I might honestly just change my legal name to WB.
That said, I certainly wouldn't feel this way if my normie name were even half as cool as *Jack DeSpain*. That's a name to build an empire around!
Aye, that's the dilemma. I really am fond of my name.
Fortunately, there's an easy enough way around it for me: I retconned my pseudonym into being the name of my jackal character, so I still have a good excuse to use both.
Out of interest id like to ask, are there any other religions that when a person leaves call themselves ‘ex such and such’? Ex Christian, ex Catholic, that type of thing. It really stood out to me when I read it.
Of course all religions have sects that tend to be more intense. I’m not sure if that’s the case with Mormonism? But I still haven’t heard the ‘ex’ part if a person leaves that religion. Have you? I’m just wondering to be honest.
I think this probably applies to all major religions. If you left Islam, for instance, it would be accurate to call yourself an "ex-Muslim." It's just that in the English-speaking world we almost never encounter de-converts of other religions than Christianity, and even when we do, their former faith is of little relevance to us.
Tracing Woodgrains is having the same rationalist conversation that I was having in 2007 now in 2024. It went nowhere then. It will continue to go nowhere in the future. This is because the perspective studiously avoids the real questions at the heart of the problem. We need to get past this.
Secular religion is an oxymoron by definition. This would be like saying I’m waiting for a triangle to have 4 sides or I’m waiting for the sun to come out during night time. What you claim you are looking for is true religion, which is something different than “secular religion” which is just wanting to live a modern lifestyle that isn’t nihilistic
But the problem is he doesn't believe in the supernatural stuff that's at the center of religion. Is he supposed to brainwash himself into believing it so he can get the social and emotional benefits of religion?
Well, yeah, he's going to have to do that regardless. He's doing it even now. No matter what secular religion, no matter what version of "mormonism except the parts I don't like" comes about, it will require a supernatural, emotional, spiritual claim; something powerful enough to bring people together. And only after will an attempt be made to try to justify through a rational perspective.
This strikes me as convenient for people but untrue in the ways that matter. There's a major difference between accepting, say, "Joseph Smith was a prophet of God who found ancient records buried in a hill" and eg "The human project is worth continuing." The only way to properly equate claims like those is by drawing an untenably large boundary for the term "supernatural" that wholly elides the problem people have with accepting the supernatural to begin with.
It's trivially true that reason is the servant of the passions, but "you need a moral core before you can reason towards how it should be pursued" looks very different to "you need to accept false claims about the world before you can bring people together." The latter looks clearly untrue from my angle and I'm wholly unpersuaded by attempts to equate them.
I'm not stating "the human project is worth continuing" is a supernatural claim, hence why I mentioned emotional or spiritual claims too. But I do question whether it's a powerful enough idea, if it inspires great enough commitment, to bring people together long enough to actually continue that project in a productive way. Considering the evidence thus far, this is doubtful!
And I would rephrase your last paragraph thusly: "no matter your moral core, you're not going to arrive at it rationally."
You did mention emotional claims, but you did so aiming to contradict someone who pointed out I don't believe in the supernatural element and am not inclined to fake belief in it. Supernatural claims and including an emotional/moral core in your belief system are very, very different. You can't, or shouldn't, excuse the one by appealing to the other. If your response is that I should accept the supernatural because I already accept that morality is not purely rational, you've elided the whole disagreement, taking a trivial premise and extrapolating outwards to a wild conclusion.
We have at least three models of powerful secular religions, two broadly negative and one broadly positive: traditional Marxism, social justice progressivism, and Effective Altruism. Each of them inspires extraordinary commitment from its followers and has led to large-scale organization (the third less so than the former two, but it's also much younger). More broadly, larger and larger portions of our collective societal/moral frame have been contributed by people who reject the supernatural, including more and more load-bearing ones.
It is only appropriate that as the inaccuracy of supernatural claims becomes more and more apparent, people work to build serious systems without them. In my eyes, for someone with sufficient understanding to reject the supernatural to retreat back to it rather than building with what they've been given amounts to intellectual cowardice—a sense that they cannot possibly use a frame rooted in truth to accomplish what others managed with frames rooted in falsehood. I reject that wholeheartedly.
"If your response is that I should accept the supernatural because I already accept that morality is not purely rational"
No, my original response was simply to remind the other poster that none of us is rational and that everyone accepts claims that aren't rational in order to have a moral core. That much you accept as well.
If I'm rolling my eyes, it's at rationalist attempts I've encountered, like effective altruism, that pretend that's not the case.
That the claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are outrageous, supernatural and much larger in scope compared to effective altruism is of course true and to me at least, kind of the point. And the intellectual cowardice is, in my mind, the rejection of all supernatural.
"More broadly, larger and larger portions of our collective societal/moral frame have been contributed by people who reject the supernatural, including more and more load-bearing ones." Time will tell if this is a good thing. I'm personally not optimistic.
Naming those three things as "secular religions" gives the term an absolutely abysmal track record. Even "effective altruism" is mostly just a bunch of autists jerking each other off online. Is there an "effective altruist" church where I can take my wife and kids in confidence that it will provide a nurturing environment for my family? No, there isn't, and there isn't likely to be because "effective altruists" are too busy worrying about nonsense like "AI risk" to bother building anything like that.
Frankly I can't think of any better argument *against* secular religions than to provide these things as case studies of what they look like.
Here’s the problem with the way modern people talk about “religion.” They buy into Enlightenment premises. They say oh well religion is this private thing some people choose to believe with no rational basis. That’s the complete opposite of how religion was viewed for thousands of years. Religion is based on truth, not on pragmatism. And if you have a pragmatic religion, it will die because no one ACTUALLY believes it. We all need to purge this thinking. Now this is hard for Mormons in particular because Mormonism is a modern pragmatic religion whose end goal is basically to be a nice citizen. However if you want to find true religion you need to look into deeper and older philosophy and thinking, which many are starting to do rather than invent some secular BS to inspire people because at the end of the day, fear of death will kill any secular belief system as it did with old pagan systems.
I actually have an essay about just that:
https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1718019769872392550
"Deeper and older philosophy and thinking" is a good starting point, but I don't particularly buy into wisdom of the ancients as a generalized approach. We've been growing closer to the truth, not further, over time.
What’s your basis for the claim “we have been growing closer to truth?” In a day and age where we trans kids and our IQ is declining year over year you’re going to have to cite your sources. Also your article was actually really solid, but again you went back to Enlightenment thinking on religion. Religion not just something you believe really hard, that presupposes that you can’t arrive at true beliefs. Religion is giving God what He is owed. Our current civil rights John Lennon regime isn’t religious, it’s idolatry of the autonomy of the self over all other bonds.
Sure, but which God? Yours, I'm afraid, I am not convinced by.
As for increasing proximity to truth, scientific and technological progress has broadly all pointed one direction. Cultural progress is more mixed, doesn't track "truth" the same way, and in some ways has never been quite on track since World War I, but I'm grateful to be able to be in a gay interracial marriage without societal sanction, for example.
It is because I grew up rooted in tradition that I can confidently reject appeals to an idealized past. There are problems now; there were problems then. We can and must build to the future. https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1789336604013683196
Yes but those aren’t good arguments. Saying science has gotten better doesn’t actually mean we’ve gained a better understanding of the world. All mainstream western academies say men can become women and many of them argue science is a Western construct. Does that sound like a society that has better understanding and has progressed? And even if you want to talk about science, it’s just an abstraction of the real world, not actually the real world. Saying we have a better understanding now is like saying oh well we have metal detectors now that give us precise measurements so we have a better understanding of what metal is. That’s simply just not true. As for societal progress, many people would argue that there’s no such thing as a “same sex marriage” and that “gay” is as fictional identity as a “trans man” so again none of these are really sound arguments. If you want to rail on religion you’re going to need to understand what you are railing against rather than just appeal to strawmen
From your twitter post:
> In movements, as in nature: Adapt, migrate, or die.
This is not an original creed. It was the creed of the late 19th/early 20th century Futurian Technocrats. In order to adept they sought to treat the world as one giant factory and people as mere components of machines. They ended up providing the ideology to the great 20th century Totalitarian states.
You wrote:
> I'm not going to throw myself into a project and a culture worse than the one I left behind.
Seems to me like you already have. You've thrown yourself into a project that's not just worse than what you left behind but one whose results are downright dystopian.
> Sure, but which God?
That's a later question.
For someone in your position the first step is to realize that what you think of as "materialism" is incoherent and what you think of as the "supernatural" does in fact exist.
"Giving God what He is owed" is sort of begging the question if you insist on it in absence of actually proving that God exists and that some particular conception of what He is owed is actually correct. It's the same sort of illogic as is found in some of the modern secular religions you dislike, where they start off axiomatically with statements like "Trans Women Are Women" and consider it blasphemy to actually demand evidence of it.
When you have the proper understanding of words you realize that “secular religion” makes no sense. And yes I believe the proper definition is giving God what He is owed because God is provable solely through reason as Vatican I states. Now you can ask why that is but you’ll have to study philosophy to understand these things rather than just say “I’m modern I know better.”
And since I don't believe in the truth of religion, there's no way to argue me into becoming religious through appeals to authority, morality, social science, history, or anything else other than a direct proof of the supernatural alleged facts that religion is based upon (a different set of them for each religion).
Again this is a very modern view of religion. You can investigate supernatural alleged facts of Catholicism (Eucharistic miracles, Shroud of Turin, Marian Apparitions, Demonic possessions) and find them all very convincing, however those are called “motives of credibility” rather than proofs of the faith. Proofs of Gods existence are about philosophy that are indisputable which is why in the West they reigned for thousands of years. You’ll have to get into philosophy to see the truth of religion.
I don't think anything short of a frontal lobotomy would stop my mind from taking a modern view of things, if that means caring about facts, logic, and evidence instead of ineffable feelings.
So what are "facts, logic, and evidence"? Are they merely ineffable feelings? If not, then what are they?
Do you believe in, say quantum physics?
Have you personally encountered proof of modern physics?
Thank you all, WP, Michael Perrone, Dan T for engaging in this enlightening (sorry WP) conversation that has been very educational. And so civil! 😂
Thank you! I’ve enjoyed it! And nice pun there even as an Enlightenment hater I can appreciate it lol
That's like trying to get the benefits of celestial navigation without believing in the round earth.
One problem (among many) with all the talk of replacing religion is that no one ever seems to discuss what its hierarchy should be based on. In the church, you have a priest who is the clear leader of the flock. The congregation submits to his wisdom and follows him in practicing the faith. As a basic form of human social organization, any serious attempt at a replacement must either copy this structure or at least explain what its alternative structure will be and why.
Who will the priests of a hypothetical "secular religion" be? Why will people follow them and submit to them as leaders? In the church, the hierarchy works specifically because the congregation accepts that there is a higher truth which lies outside of themselves and to which they are submitting--they are granting that there is something else out there which knows better than they do and they are willing to follow it. Whenever I hear discussions like this one, or read about Malcolm and Simone Collins, this element is completely absent. Instead, as rationalists their basic conception of the world is the opposite of this--that they individually know better than the church.
It thus seems extremely unlikely that such people would have any possibility of re-creating the sort of hierarchy that is necessary for something like a church to function. The second that any of them have even a small disagreement about anything, the entire enterprise would collapse, assuming that they could ever agree on enough to get it started in the first place.
Given the number of companies that exist, “clear hierarchical organization is impossible or implausible in secular orders” isn’t a viable claim, so perhaps the concern is specific to morality-focused secular orders? Even there, plenty of organizations have solved this locally. Authority doesn’t need to come from the divine; it can be as simple as “this is the person who made this organization and has the will to keep it going.”
>Given the number of companies that exist, “clear hierarchical organization is impossible or implausible in secular orders” isn’t a viable claim, so perhaps the concern is specific to morality-focused secular orders?<
Yes, obviously we are talking about morality-focused orders here. A corporation also has a clear organizing principle, the profit margin. Likewise in a corporation *everyone gets paid*, whereas you explicitly talk about the need for "volunteerism."
>Even there, plenty of organizations have solved this locally.<
Such as? If the institutions you are seeking already exist, why aren't you simply pointing people to them, instead of talking about the need to form them?
>Authority doesn’t need to come from the divine; it can be as simple as “this is the person who made this organization and has the will to keep it going.”<
Yes, every now and then a group of people organized around a single leader's ego will come along, we usually call those cults. "Trust me bro I'm awesome" is a *terrible* pitch for why people should put skin in your game. If you want an institution that scales and persists to any degree at all, you obviously need to do better than that. Likewise you need to give people some kind of higher principle or value-set in order to motivate them to engage in selfless behavior such as volunteering. "Do it because I think you should" clearly won't cut it.
Why not point people to them? Because I disagree with the specifics of social justice progressivism and Effective Altruism, of course. I’m not looking for A Secular Religion, I’m looking for a structure that aligns with my values.
Why should anyone else care about your particular values?
The theory would be that people already share those values. For instance, a community of "gay couples" who are having "children" in the way that Tracing plans to, coming together over the shared value of raising their "families." Obviously, reality suggests that this does not work in practice, people simply don't show up for it once they've learned to think of themselves as the ultimate authority, as sovereign individuals who are beholden to nothing.
The intellectually honest position would be that giving up on religion will necessarily sacrifice some degree of social cohesion but that it's overall worth it so that we can have nice things like "gay marriage." This is the pattern you can observe in basically every single advanced society, certainly every white liberal society at least. But again, obviously, the people who understand themselves to be on the "winning" side of that trade don't want to say that out loud. They want to find a way to assure the losers that no, somehow we're all winners, and you can be too if you just quit with all that pesky talk about God already.
Strongly identify with what Trace says here about identifying with your pseudonym... most of my significant relations met me as Walt, which at this point feels a lot more palpably "me" than my actual name. Instead of doxxing myself I might honestly just change my legal name to WB.
That said, I certainly wouldn't feel this way if my normie name were even half as cool as *Jack DeSpain*. That's a name to build an empire around!
Aye, that's the dilemma. I really am fond of my name.
Fortunately, there's an easy enough way around it for me: I retconned my pseudonym into being the name of my jackal character, so I still have a good excuse to use both.
Oh, he’s cute—married? Ah, shame… in the next life, perhaps…
Malcolm and Simone Collins have a secular, humanistic recontextualization of Christianity that I (even as an atheist/agnostic) find compelling
“Why we believe in a Techno-Puritan God”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i75CrJAHtpY
Nah it’s dumb because they don’t actually believe in it they are just larping about “progress”
sorry that it's different from your traditionalist interpretation ;)
It’s not just “different” it’s just that it’s transparently fake and they themselves don’t even believe it so it’s a nonstarter
Also Malcolm actively incorporating his porn addiction into it won't help.
Seriously? Clown world strikes again.
He has a whole video discussing his interpretation of the Garden of Eden story to mean it's immoral to ban porn.
Out of interest id like to ask, are there any other religions that when a person leaves call themselves ‘ex such and such’? Ex Christian, ex Catholic, that type of thing. It really stood out to me when I read it.
Of course all religions have sects that tend to be more intense. I’m not sure if that’s the case with Mormonism? But I still haven’t heard the ‘ex’ part if a person leaves that religion. Have you? I’m just wondering to be honest.
I think this probably applies to all major religions. If you left Islam, for instance, it would be accurate to call yourself an "ex-Muslim." It's just that in the English-speaking world we almost never encounter de-converts of other religions than Christianity, and even when we do, their former faith is of little relevance to us.
If you left Islam would you be ex-Muslim because they would expect that? The other Muslims? I like that expression ‘de-convert’. 😂