[TeMPOraL]

I think we've lost something here. Shared delusions are delusions, but the important part was that they're shared. Unfortunately, science doesn't have the "shared" part - by itself, it doesn't build communities. In my experience, if you ignore the particulars of faith, most religions are essentially community construction kits.

We'll probably figure this out at some point - we need to, if we are to survive. Right now, the alternative community glues to religion are national identities, supernational identities (e.g. "I'm a citizen of EU" vs "citizen of country X"), and a wide variety of little identities we create for ourselves as we join groups we're interested in. But the problem with most of those is that they're detached from geography - so they're not particularly useful for building geographically-defined communities.

[patcon]

> most religions are essentially community construction kits

love this.

What you wrote really resonates with me. Particularly the thinking on geographically-defined communities being important. I feel the full significance of this swap/migration (geographic => web) is not appreciated by most people (neither the builders of modern social networks, nor the participants), and we continue to bricolage our established geographic social networks with internet-based ones at our own peril.

I hate to sound melodramatic, but... increased tendency toward civil strife and failing democracies seems pretty dramatic to me