As someone formerly in the same boat, I think belief in the Abrahamic religions makes it hard to identify with the plights of others, because if you believe in a just, loving god, then "those people" have the religion and hardships that they do for a reason (and the reason is usually either "it's part of God's plan" or "they made bad decisions").

When you base your entire worldview on a faulty premise, you can use sound logic to get all the way to libertarianism without a problem. Once I reexamined and discarded my belief in the Christian god, it was like flipping a switch; I went from douchey religious Libertarian to bleeding-heart socialist almost literally overnight.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Indeed. That's one of my biggest problems with religion and why it makes me uncomfortable even though I ostensibly believe that people have their right to spirituality. Ultimately, with spiritual premises, people can come to faulty or unpredictable conclusions even with sound logic, and that somewhat unnerves me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Ultimately, with spiritual premises, people can come to faulty or unpredictable conclusions even with sound logic, and that somewhat unnerves me.

Definitely.

Although, to be completely fair, as toxic as I believe theistic religions to be, religion and politics are far from the only areas with this problem. Cosmologists, trained philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, and physicists all suffer from this same issue. Something as basic as assuming the universe is finite vs. infinite leads to drastically different conclusions in a wide variety of fields, and there's a decent argument to be made for each contradictory assumption

Defining your initial and boundary conditions properly has a huge impact on your results, even if you do everything else right. Edit: so it's even trickier in areas where we don't know what the initial or boundary conditions are

[–] julietOscarEcho 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The huge difference with the professions you mention is that in all of them successful participants don't wed themselves to any premise. They can allow for the possibility of two competing premises, or even usefully imagine a world with a counterfactual premise, and accurately communicate the uncertainty or incongruence of their views (it is technically possible for political science to work this way too, but rare to find someone who hasn't picked a "team" outside of academia).

The irrationality and intellectual danger lies not in adopting hypothesis but in granting them the status of dogma.

I would also argue that the potential for real world harm of adopting a wrong premise is way less for a cosmologist or mathematician than for a religious leader or politician. Relevant SMBC: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/purity-3

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Don't get me wrong, I don't think they should be in equal footing. I'm just saying that it's worth remembering that a healthy dose of skepticism and analysis of the baked-in assumptions is valuable in many fields, and pointing out how otherwise reasonable people can end up voting conservative based purely on a single unexamined assumption.

Edit: and I always appreciate a relevant SMBC link, especially one that properly recognizes the power of chemistry ;)

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