The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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You're right, it's not the place! You didn't really keep it brief either... ;P
This depends on what you see as truth. From a purely empirical standpoint, sure, religion is bullshit and there's no way Jesus rose from the dead etc etc. That being said, I've come to realize there is far more to the idea of truth than most rationalists believe. There is experiential knowledge that exists and can be verified by ourselves. Sure our consciousness isn't foolproof and we can trick ourselves, but there is factual knowledge to be gained there. In fact, it's the one frontier that science really hasn't been able to penetrate yet.
And if you take that view, then
seems pretty facile and wrong. These religious traditions are the honed core of wisdom that has persisted for thousands of years, through societal upheavals and persecutions and all sorts of other trials. This wisdom has persisted longer than any kingdom, state or empire. The truths extolled in religions are literally the central truths for the vast majority of humans who have ever lived.
Regardless, I'm not trying to rehash the athiest culture wars, just explaining how I've arrived at my current post-rationalist or meta-rationalist opinions. Also, at the end of the day, rationality doesn't seem to make people very happy. In fact in my experience, and the experience of most I've seen in the rationalist/EA spaces, it does the exact opposite. So even if religion does happen to be totally wrong on all counts, which I doubt, at the very least it's a useful and positive delusion for most people.
I've noticed this too, but then I took a step back and recognized a larger pattern. This is something like the stages of grief. I think rationality causes people to go through many stages/emotions and unhappiness is just one they can temporarily land on.
If you look at other examples of people radically changing their belief system later in life you will often observe that they go through a cycle of emotional states.
Do these emotional states just appear from nothing? I'd argue that they become happier because they find some other belief system above and beyond rationality that helps them integrate their psyche.
Rationality alone is cold comfort.
In the acceptance stage (the last stage) of grief:
I don't know why it is human nature that most people have to go through all the other stages before they can come to acceptance. I just observe that it happens. When something unfair/unjust happens in the world many people will become angry initially. Many eventually come around to acceptance over time. Just because things are unfair the rational action isn't to waste your energy being upset/angry forever.
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