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Just because it worked in Renaissance Europe does not mean that it works now. Clearly it is possible for people to be both religious and very intelligent. It is easy to find thousands of examples. However, just as clearly, in today's world there is a correlation between high degrees of religiousness and scientific/technological/organizational backwardness. I do not know why the correlation exists, but I see that it does exist. And of course even today it would be easy to find individual counterexamples, but that does not mean that the correlation does not exist on a group level.
In short, I am committed to the dichotomy in part because to me it does not seem fake. I also largely agree with 2rafa's idea that nationalism is antithetical to Darwininan meritocracy. The question of whether nationalism is still justified for moral reasons is, however, a separate one. Just because there exists a Darwinian rat-race of various nations that compete with each other over who can build the most advanced economies and instruments of destruction so that they can defend themselves from each other and expand their own power does not necessarily mean that for the sake of winning such competition we should throw some of our countrymen to the curb. That is a very different question.
That said, you would be right if you perceived that my distaste for religiousness is in part driven by unpragmatic motivations. I just find, say, Christianity to be false on a literal level the same way that I find Scientology to be false on a literal level, so it offends my intellectual conscience. I am not a physicalist reductionist. I do not think that consciousness can necessarily be explained in terms of matter. I find much to be repelled by in simplistic materialism and in dogmatic scientism. But the truth claims of all organized religions have little appeal to me, although I can see that some individuals are capable of compartmentalizing their religiousness and their truth-seeking and thus doing brilliant scientific work despite also believing in the literal truth of some religion.
I’m interested to know: how many Mormons have you spent time with? I ask because I know many - half of my family is LDS, as are several of my very close friends - and I think that they’re a brilliant illustration of the dichotomy falling apart. The juxtaposition of the profound irrationality - at least, from an epistemic/historical/materialist perspective - of many of their beliefs with their evident success within the modern technological/financial rat race could not be more pronounced. The remarkable success and spread of the LDS faith is especially surprising when you imagine what sort of people, in terms of neurotype and personality, must have been attracted to Joseph Smith’s preaching (and in many cases obvious confabulation) in the first place. From extremely inauspicious beginnings, this religious community of hardscrabble pioneers and gullible converts grew into one of the most successful religious/ethnic groups in the world. I understand that they are only one example of many, and that there are plenty of counterexamples, but I do want to point them out as an example of a modern people who clearly illustrate that there is no necessary inverse correlation between falsity of religious beliefs on one hand, and ability to thrive in the modern world on the other.
The exact kind of intelligence and uncompromising desire to understand everything that discovered evolution, physics, and modern civilization is the thing that undermined religion. Believing in grand religious moral claims requires you to care less about the above. It'll also make it harder to understand, respond to, shape, or fight future technological and social developments that'll clash with our current rough understanding of morality - whether that be transhumanism, AI, gene editing, or just the ambitions of technological civilization. Believing something like 'it is God's Truth that Man And Woman must Marry' is both confused and actively harmful if AI takes over, or even rejecting embryo selection or gene editing because it's not God's Plan when that happens. It's like believing in the traditional divination for the time to plant your crops ... after you've discovered irrigation.
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I have not personally known any Mormons. I acknowledge their ability to thrive in the modern world but I think that they are an outlier that does not invalidate the existence of the correlation that I have written about.
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