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It's bad faith and deceptive if done to avoid responsibility and guilt, as opposed to a process to acknowledge and overcome. Again, culturally-resonate examples abound: faking a conversion is contemptable, conversion as a new start is respectable. Or we could raise the more progressive-secular example of transition, or the chance to reset/reframe when marrying into another family, or so on.
Separately, there is a bit of amusement given that encouraging people to abandon old personas and pretend to be someone else, but in compliance with the rules, has been a Mission Accomplished success of The Motte's modding philosophy when dealing with sockpuppets who stay more within the rules. I realize Motte modding is non-generalizable, but it is applicable as a (sub)cultural example.
People who convert generally don't pretend to be someone else and abandon their previous identity. Even if Trace apologized for pranking LoTT (which, by the way, I agree was a low point, but seriously y'all need to get over it, it's not like LoTT has ever been doing any kind of quality or good faith "journalism") and disappeared, if he reappeared as Earnest McGee, brand new social media account talking about culture war topics, and then was discovered to be TracingWoodgrains, I think you and his other detractors would be the first to gleefully drag him. You would not grant him absolution and forgiveness.
Yes they do. I will disagree with you here, particularly since I'm referring to the more variable forms of conversion and not simply religious.
People who do major lifetime conversions frequently cut ties and connections with their previous identities, including in some cases the formal identities themselves, in their efforts to distance themselves from these past personas and habbits. This can go from religious/cult conversion, gender transition, nationalization, marriage, even very banal things like going to college and dropping old nicknames to adopt new monikers. The very act of creating and internet pseudonum is an act of obscuring a previous identity, and we don't consider that a falsification, even though the research on how people's behavior and prowess over the internet change vis-a-vis in person is well established.
We could endlessly go into how in depth as to how relevant twitter-handles and Rationalist-sphere psuedonums are to these, but I suspect it would be missing the point regardless.
I am as always impressed by your long-distance over-internet mindreading powers of my views and approaches to absolution and forgiveness. I can only hope that you are as capable in person.
In return, I am reminded of the opening paragraph of the classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup.
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