Has anyone here written about religious fictionalism?

post by SpectrumDT · 2024-06-04T12:10:21.987Z · LW · GW · 1 comment

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    3 David Gross
    2 jimv
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Religious fictionalism, as I understand it, is the position that religion can be valuable and worth practicing and spreading even though it makes false claims. I was inspired to ask this question by the below YouTube video essay by Kane Baker.

Has anyone on Less Wrong written about religious fictionalism and the arguments for and against it? I could not immediately find anything when I searched for it, but it may have been covered under other names.

This thread is not an attempt to argue for or against religious fictionalism. I just want to know if anyone can point me to existing discussions here which touch upon the subject.

Thanks!

Video by Kane Baker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSucRrn1JbU&pp=ygUWcmVsaWdpb3VzIGZpY3Rpb25hbGlzbQ%3D%3D 

Answers

answer by David Gross · 2024-06-04T22:48:21.690Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnNNGWQEX7CgaqBt2/notes-on-reverence [LW · GW]

Excerpt:

“I am an atheist, and am addressing an audience in which, if I’m not mistaken, respect for the tenets of established religion [? · GW] is fairly low. But I want to explore reverence — in the spirit of Chesterton’s Fence [? · GW] — because it is common to many virtue systems across cultures and across time. Among the questions that concern me:

  • “Are there aspects of reverence that are valuable that rationalists can preserve and nurture in their own ways in their own traditions?
  • “Is reverence perhaps so valuable that it is worth taking a ‘leap of faith’ beyond the limits of rationalism in order to practice it?”

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