Why People Leave Their Religion & How We Will (Try To) Guard Against It

Description: Malcolm and Simone discuss the key elements they designed into their constructed religion to make it "leakproof" against losing members over generations. This includes logical consistency, future-proofing for science advances, democratized prophets, and encouraging respectful dissent within the faith. They also explain how framing it in the Judeo-Christian tradition reduces conflict while allowing more conservative strains to potentially emerge again someday.

Some key topics covered:

* Why old religions lose scientists and logical thinkers

* Solving the "good God" problem

* Localized miracles issue with universalist faiths

* Mutiple valid revelations concept

* Future God and simulation theory

* Value systems built into hierarchy

* Encouraging rebellion tied to fidelity

* Reducing conflict with conservative faiths

* End goal of spreading the western tradition to the stars

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] let's talk about science inconsistency because this is a bigger problem for Christianity than Christians like to pretend. So Christians will be like, look at all of the great things that we, the Western tradition, have accomplished

and what they are carefully ignoring here is that most of the most important scientists in the past hundred years, if they were born within the Judeo Christian tree, left the Judeo Christian tree either during their period of most productive work, or at least before they died.

So you don't really get to, like, clearly there's a problem here for whatever reason, your most productive scientists are leaving the tradition. This is a big problem.

It's actually interesting how symbiotic like if this takes off how symbiotic it is with traditional cultural traditions and that it literally sees it as a religious order to help protect their members from deconverting.

And it only wants to prevent the people who they would otherwise have bleeding off from it but they would really rather not fall to the urban monoculture. [00:01:00] We can act as a good backstop, which can prevent talented individuals from falling into the urban monoculture.

So it's acting as part of this cultural economy that prevents the true dangerous force from destroying our civilization before it can reach the stars and ensuring that the Western cultural tradition does. Join the stars to some extent. If someone's gonna be like, Why don't you care about the Eastern culture of Lucian?

Because that's not us! Like, I have no connection to that. It would be weird and almost kind of racist for me to attempt to simulate that, or simp that, you know. We can we can work to help them where we can, but we're not part of that tradition.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Simone and Malcolm are back.

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. This is going to be a fun, particularly spicy episode today. I always get worried because our, our religion episodes, they typically perform really poorly at first and then they do better after a while. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's lower click through higher watch time, but they're my favorite episodes to do.

Because it's a [00:02:00] topic that I just have been thinking so much about recently. And I think, you know, in the question of pronatalism becomes such an existential question for our species. Because in writing the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, I mean, from the pronatalist perspective, it seems to be the only thing, like, religious cultures that are able to motivate high fertility in wealthy groups, like, the only thing, like, I have not found it.

Anything else that reliably seems to do it, but then in addition to that, in writing the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, it just became really obvious to us that there's a correlation between the rise of mental issues in our society. And dangerous viral memes like the virus which is what we call the, the urban monoculture sometimes.

And the decline of religious traditions. I mean, religious traditions may have been like a janky antivirus that had a bunch of bloatware on it, but it [00:03:00] was the only antivirus we had. Yeah. And when people ripped it out. They didn't realize how susceptible they were making the population to extremely virulent and, and, and quite selfish and dangerous memetic sets.

And we're now beginning to see the fallout of all of that. But this all comes to a problem for us, right? So a lot of people are like, well, then just go back to one of the old religions. And we've done an episode on this, but, but it's something I want to pontificate on more while also talking about how we construct a system for our kids which is designed to have a low, low bleed rate, like withstand this storm, this, you know, this, this, it's like a bunch of the century storm that's only getting worse every year that all of the religious traditions have to intergenerationally weather against before we get to the other side of this.

So, so how do I build that? But in thinking about that, I think a lot of people from more traditional religions will be able to think about some of the tools and techniques that we're using. Where they [00:04:00] could implement them within their existing systems to lower the bleed rate with their own kids. Now, in part to answer, you know, why not one of the old traditions, Which is a question that

Simone Collins: constantly comes up.

Malcolm Collins: Yes I think it goes, worse talking about, so recently I was interviewing my dad about his life. We've done hours and hours of this now, so I'll see if I post it on here. And I was asking about, you know, when he left the religious tradition, right? Like when my family left the faith, because if he's half me, right?

What it means is that if I tried to raise my kids in one of these, the traditional religious contexts, they might leave as well. For whatever reason, he left Christianity, right? And he was antagonistic enough towards Christianity that he refused to get married in a church, for example. Oh, wow. And when he normally, even

Simone Collins: like, totally indifferent people deigned to get married in a church if a spouse cares about

Malcolm Collins: it.

And he bragged about never once going into the central church where all of the like a lot of formal stuff is done at Stanford. He went [00:05:00] really out of his way to avoid ever setting foot in there. So that was That's intense! That, that is, Yeah, the level of useful antagonism he had toward these institutions.

So he when he was younger was in, Sunday school and he ended up the, it was apparently a, a fairly big thing where he was punished pretty severely. Like, it was considered like a, a pretty big deal that he had done this and what he had done, was gotten very interested in the logistics of the Noah story in trying to figure out how that was possible.

Because, you know, someone was talking to you about this, you're like, yeah, all the measurements are there. Like, if you really want to, like, get nerdy and go deep on the logistics of this to try to figure it out that's the type of thing that Of course, anyone who's seen me talking, you know, I talk about humans as intergenerational entities.

It's exactly the type of thing that would have happened had my dad stayed in the faith and raised me in the faith, right? And this, that he would be punished for asking these technical [00:06:00] questions was a really hard thing for, for him to take. Like he couldn't stand following a tradition. That would punish him for asking questions like this.

And, and that's what had him turn away from it. And this was really interesting to me for a couple reasons, right? Like if I think about it as us from a cultural group