I throw my hat in with Mark Yuray (and M. Moldbug) in the argument about whether to restore the Great Tradition or to synthesize a religion based on reason.

Go ahead and read Yuray’s essay and the previous one that he references to get caught up.

I don’t really want to get into the details (in part because I go into some of the reasoning in more detail in my forthcoming e-pamphlet), but at least some of the personal influence for me is that I have been a part of various rationalist religion-replacement efforts not related to any Yudkowsky cult earlier in my life.

That experience also lead me to lend some more credence to the history of such rationalist cults going back to the Reformation, but also the various Marxist manifestations of such cults.

I’m just incredibly skeptical of any such efforts for similar reasons as to why I don’t believe in central planning in economics. There is too much hidden knowledge contained within a traditional religion. The trees of an engineered effort are liable to bear mutant fruits.

Because I have been part of such a failed effort up-close, and because it really had destructive consequences for most of the people involved, and because other similar efforts have often had monstrous consequences, I’ve cast my lot with the nostalgic Christians.

I am also contemporary Silicon Valley-ish in that I believe that execution is more important than ideation. The guys spending a lot of time coming up with new ideas will be outperformed by the people who take the field and jerry-rig solutions to problems as they present themselves. Also, building trust tends to be more important than most people operating on their own tend to figure out.

Ensuring that the guy next to you does not stab you in the ass is a hard problem that most people in most places fail to solve. It’s a particular problem for secularists, but less of an issue for more orthodox religions, because of the presence of (wait for it…) hierarchy and structure that limits schismatic behavior.

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