Aaron Rabinowitz summarizes his cult:
Someone asked what are the views of our cult. Thoughts on this:
- The truth is complex and painful but intrinsically valuable, so help others learn it and help others suffer through it.
- Luck drives everything, so have as much empathy as you can for those who suffer and do wrong.
- Morality and value are still real, because experience is real and instills in us a variety of obligations that, when enacted, promote flourishing.
This is what atheism could have been. I think many atheists accepted #1 — loudly proclaiming that we have the truth has been a big deal all along — but balked at #2. So many atheists are proud adherents of the cult of capitalism, which insists that all personal progress is a result of merit, and were willing to accept the science of evolution only because of the concept of natural selection, which they considered to be the natural representation of capitalism. They don’t like to hear that modern evolutionary theory puts much more emphasis on chance, or even that selection is a stochastic process rather than an inevitability.
They choke before they even get to #3, because they are so busy cheering for Ben Shapiro’s facts don’t care about your feelings
that they don’t notice that feelings are also part of reality. I’ve noticed that a lot of atheists run away angrily at the very notion of moral obligations, because, as they tell me all the time, “atheism means nothing more than a disbelief in gods”. The virtue of Rabinowitz’s formulation is that it moves beyond a statement of fact to a recognition of the implications of that fact.
I think they may have misinterpreted #1, come to think of it, as “The truth is complex and painful but intrinsically valuable, so be sure to feel superior about your possession of it”.