[loup-vaillant]

Hmm, as an avid LessWrong Lurker, I can share my first impressions:

Religion: does it have any basis in reality? That's a real question, as I know of a religion that does: copyism¹. Also Note that LessWrong did come up with a winter solstice ritual.

Post modernism: as far as I know, this is just confusion. Even if it's all in our heads, well, that's how the world works. Anyway, it empirically seems that magical thinking doesn't work, so… there is a world out there, and it seems to be ruled by relatively simple rules. It may be not so, but my estimate is so low that investigating that isn't worth my time. Now if I get the chance to probe a postmodernist's brain…

Eugenics: slow, unreliable in the short term, and have incredibly dangerous political implications. Probably not worth investigating much further. Now, if you go beyond mere selective breeding, and start to directly (and precisely) manipulate our genome, we may go somewhere. But at that point, uploading (if it can work) could be a better option.

Your second paragraph sounds correct. Now how do we make people feel whole?

[1]: http://www.copyism.org/

[drostie]

I dunno. "Does it have any basis in reality" sounds somewhat bizarre. Think of points in the board game Settlers of Catan (or choose your favourite): do they have any "basis in reality"? In some ways yes, in most ways no; and in any case there is something seriously wrong with the person who sees the points in the game as belonging to the material world, rather than belonging to a social field of interactions. Religions are about authentic living, meaningfulness, mindfulness, and reminding yourself with ritual of that which is most important. They are about experience for its own sake, especially experience which invokes the Other. I understand the temptation to reify Otherness in the supernatural and/or look for it in the material; in that sense I agree that some religions strive to have a basis in reality. I would not characterize it as a universal trend or a universally applicable question: just to take the three Abrahamic religions, it applies extremely well to Christianity, only imperfectly to Islam, and extremely poorly to modern Judaism.

If I knew a way to help people feel whole which was not religious, I would pursue that instead. The world does not need a new religion; it needs more authentic interaction, more Real People if you like. But questions of meaning and completeness and fulfilment seem to be deeply religious, which is why I sit down every night to meditate and/or write for an hour.

[loup-vaillant]

"Basis in reality" was poor wording. A better question would be "what is the evidence for the factual claims of your religion?". That's the base line.

> Religions are about authentic living, meaningfulness, mindfulness, and reminding yourself with ritual of that which is most important.

Sounds both compatible with a correct vision of the world, and a worthy goal. So far, I'm not scared away. I will be if you suddenly require me to believe things that I deem too improbable, though (canonical example: a supernatural God).

My point is, I do not reject the idea of a true religion. It may be dangerous, but it may be worthwhile. It just have to acknowledge powerful truth-seeking processes, like Science, and update accordingly. I do think however that mos current religions are hopelessly false.