Today in Alex's ill-informed opinions

[kaberett]

I have very little patience for a lot of what crosses my radar as Movement Rationalism. This is primarily because an enormous amount of it seems completely invested in, well, behaving as though humans can meaningfully and en masse be rational actors, in ways that ignore enormous amounts of evidence about How People Actually Work, with a whole bunch of ditching pragmatics in favour of ideological purity. (This shows up A Lot in Movement Atheism specifically, the adherents of which seem very keen to denigrate religion and organised religion without any actual understanding or appreciation for the psychological and sociological role played by religion even if you are starting from a point of No Supernatural Anything.)

I also find massively off-putting the idea that seems to be taken as axiomatic that Humans Are A Good Thing and it is Objectively Important to Keep The Species Going.

The problem being, of course, that I am simultaneously interested in understanding where people are coming from (and in particular having had this entire thing framed as Rational makes me go "... but? you seem to be leaving? a lot of important information? out of your modelling? because... you don't like it?") and... deeply impatient with most of the places I come across it, so: I would be interested in your views and indeed your recommendations on the approximate topic.

Comments

[davidgillon]

Atheism does seem to be overrun with dickheads (looking at you, Dawkins) who seem to delight in not treating religious believers with any respect. Which annoys me, because it's completely unnecessary to their point, and essentially boils down to using their beliefs as an excuse to openly bully people with different beliefs.

WRT 'Humans are a good thing' and keeping the species going being important, my position is 'humans are a thing', 'humans not being a thing' would be massively problematic for 1) us, 2) every creature dependent on us, 3) it's complicated.