I don't care that its 2026 and people are tired of atheists. I still think religion isn't the answer. I refuse to believe that pretending things, no matter how good they make us feel, is the right thing for human beings to do. I'll be ground up by the machine before I bow down again to an imaginary god.
I've never met an adult convert who gave off any other vibe than "I am afraid of grappling with the world as it is, so I am turning to a comforting fantasy." They can and do often dress it up in various fancy phrases. They decry the awfulness of modernity and claim religion is the solution. But it is rhetoric. People don't become religious as adults because they are dumb or lack eloquence. They convert out of fear of the world.
There were always people creating illusionary worlds to control other people who gladly believed their lies, there still are.
We live in a chaotic and illegible world, but humans crave legibility so much that they will rather believe the fantasies that take their freedoms (wealth, agency) than deal with the chaos themselves.
Religion is one such a narrative, but governments or corporations have their own, just as harmful. Or - as many people seem to think - actually beneficial, because "people cannot handle the truth". Which I don't subscribe to.
I don't think the entirety of the phenomenon can be explained by fear, and in complex issues such as this a single variable analysis is suspect.
I would encourage you to think of forces other than fear that might be driving observed behavior. It is only in this way that you have any hope of creating an alternative attractive force that satisfies the needs that are currently being served by religion.
One obvious one, is that people crave community and religion provides a ready made and welcoming community.
But this is an exercise that is best performed by you. It is about changing your own attention. Next time you come across some "adult convert", instead of looking for signs that prove your assumptions (that they are looking for comfort), look for some positive sign.
Consider how you are reacting to this very comment chain. Are you thinking "there is no possible way any person could ever be attracted to religion for any other possible reason than fear and need for comfort". When you asked me for suggestions were you actually curious? Bring that same curiosity to your next interaction. Demand of your own attention to see a positive reason.
And consider that if you are not able to notice the positive intentions in the actions of another, that might be a you problem.
People might be afraid for all sorts of reasons and seek religion as a way of allaying their fear, sure. "I want a pre-made community" is just another way of saying "I am afraid of being alone."
There is nothing wrong with wanting a community, but there is something wrong with telling people something is true when it is not just to get one. I get that people benefit from religion in a lot of ways. I just don't think that undermining basic questions of what we do and do not, what we can and can not, know, is worth those benefits.
A person who, in the privacy of their bathroom, looks in the mirror and repeats comforting lies to themselves to make themselves feel better is substantially less offensive to me than someone who publicly professes bullshit to make themselves feel better. If this seems blunt, ask yourself why we live in a world which gives automatic credence to ridiculous beliefs if and only if they happen to align with the ridiculous beliefs of a few sanctioned groups.
> "I want a pre-made community" is just another way of saying "I am afraid of being alone."
Do you think people join other communities out of fear? Someone who decides to play magic the gathering, join a dance class, a book reading group, or art class?
If people join these kinds of communities sometimes out of fear of being alone, and sometimes for other reasons, why do you not extend the same generous interpretation to people who join religious communities?
Some people see no value in learning art, music, literature or poetry. Some people do. Some people see no value in exploring spiritual topics, some people do.
Consider everything you said and apply it to improv classes. What changes?
Its libido. The alternatives are not fun and they won't make anyone rich. They present no drama and, I think, drama is the primary thing little minds want from their ideology.
And yet I can sympathize - the world seems sometimes almost absurdly inhumane at the moment, the people in charge seem both incompetent and to have a death grip on power and not out of any particular skill or strength, but because we cannot articulate any real alternative. The fantasy that we can fix this problem by embracing tradition or some other dumb shit is appealing because it doesn't force us to grapple with the real problems of the world.
In the broadest strokes I tend to agree that we will need to return to the human, but I think that doesn't have to look like Christianity or any other made up bullshit. I can be humanism, but we must be willing to do things which might lower GDP to get there. We have to be willing to restrain ourselves and others for the benefit of harmony. Tough sell for Americans.
Please god stop letting LLMs write your copy. My brain just slides right over this slop. Perhaps you have a useful product but christ almighty I cannot countenance this boring machine generated text.
This is just some claim by a person. I appreciate the context but as far as I can tell no such policy was on the books. The person making the claim has a clear motivated reason for claiming such and its all pretty vague.
It's okay, one claim is all that's needed for this adminstration and the current overton window in the US. The eternal leader himself changes his tune from sentence to sentence - the US has already won, the US needs help, the US was just testing the US has agreed to a ceasefire after discussions with Iran, even when Iran wasn't actually there.
What matters is that the claim was made, and now you have to pretend it is true.
Brian Pesta was fired for malfeasance. Specifically, he gained access to data sets not authorized for his race/IQ research and not only published bullshit race/IQ stuff off it, but also (as I understand it) circulated that data to a small community of race/IQ weirdos.
That's a grave violation. The data sets in question are extremely valuable for all kinds of science, and the reason they exist is that the people donating their data trust it won't be used for noncompliant reasons. It's not substantially different than a company like 23 Or Me surreptitiously giving your genomic data to their weird Substacker friends.
Plenty of people do legitimate race/IQ work. You managed to find cite the one person who managed to do it tortiously.
"How to lose tenure with one sentence": "Maybe it will be fine to pursue my career in Florida."
Anyway, my point stands - there is plenty of research on IQ. Only if you are specifically interested in correlating IQ with genetics have ethicists at large determined your research may be harmful. We can debate about that, I guess, but the idea that one cannot use IQ in research is a hyperbole.
Actually, I want to add something to this. The general vibe in this research area is NOT that you cannot compare IQ with genes. Indeed, its more or less an accepted fact that some portion of IQ and measures like it are indeed heritable. The specific issue this person faced is in the use of race. I'm not suggesting that we accept all the woke orthodoxy whole cloth, but race really is a socially constructed concept. No person out there in the world is "of a given race" as a scientific fact. People have genes, they don't have races. The scientific community recognizes that genes influence intelligence, but has no interest in promulgating the frankly dumb idea that humans have distinct races, probably because the last time people got really into that idea it lead to concentration camps, apartheid, and the pointless destruction of vast swaths of human potential.
The main issue with the research described is that it uses genes to construct a racial narrative. If that is the world you want to live in, you do you, I guess, but I would prefer that people not be pigeon holed on the basis of (for example) arbitrary qualities like "European Ancestry," which the person explicitly states they constructed a sort of genetic fingerprint for. In a meritocratic society people should be judged on their performance, not some inference people make about what genes they have on the basis of their level of melanin, to refer to the study this guy is talking about.
The point of university isn't to get things done - it is to imprint knowledge into your brain. If you are approaching school with the attitude of "how do I get this over with as fast as possible," you are wasting your time and the time of the teacher.
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