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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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