This is the first intermission of đ¯, listed as season 1 episode 7 for filing purposes. In this episode, TracingWoodgrains, MasterThief, The Sultan Of Swing, XantosCell, and Unsaying discuss religious community.
This discussion was originally slated to be released as an episode of the The Bailey podcast, but eventually it was decided that it should be published elsewhere instead, and so it finds its home here, at đ¯.
The image used in the video is Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld's Pentecost woodcut for "Die Bibel in Bildern", 1860:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schnorr_von_Carolsfeld_Bibel_in_Bildern_1860_226.png
Show notes:
36:00 Unsaying's superintelligence of deity post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/a54d99/the_compression_problem/
39:47 Despite instructions made in the moment, this tangent was not cut out, as it turned out to be relevant. Normally, any requests to cut something out would be honored, but everyone involved assented to this edit of the episode.
47:03 Xantos's snake-handling video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2dlnqRDmmds
Extended show notes:
(Discussing unsuitability for marriage and the path of monasticism) https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hkesjh/comment/fwy8ofv/
https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/watching-spotlight-young-priest
https://babylonbee.com/news/dozens-of-bible-verses-come-forward-to-accuse-joel-osteen-of-abuse
(If people want more BG on heresies, i dunno) https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/4ihgog/extra_history_on_early_christian_schisms_pt_2/
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Notes -
You make two claims here, first that it doesnt need to be true, and second that you dont need to believe it. Youve only given an argument for the first.
To give maybe a bit of a different perspective: I think you come to your conclusions in part because you evaluate the benefit of religion in a way thats already independent of the content of the beliefs. That way, the benefit can only be to make something happen that already ought to have happened - the typical "solving coordination problems" line of rat-adjacent cultural evolutionism.
As an analogy: Imagine there are two people on an island. In world A their goals are convex, so that both of them are better off controlling half the island than with a 50% chance of controlling it all. In world B, their goals are concave and they would rather go for the coinfilp. People in A will live together relatively peacefully, and people in B will immediately fight to the death. But it would be wrong to conclude that "Peace is a benefit of believing you live in an A world" (as statistics might lead you to). Peace is in fact bad in the B world, for both of them, irrespective of what they believe.
Basically, it seems to me that a lot of the "benefits" of religion are just things people would want to do, if the world were a more fortunate one.
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