When you are famous, people give you the benefit of the doubt.
When you are small fries, you are blogspam.
I may have to steal that phrase (:
I think what's going on here is the theory that the purpose of religion is to create a trusted in-group separated from the out-group, with rules that make it difficult to casually join. [1] If you start from that premise, PG's footnote makes sense. But this ignores the fact that the largest religions really want as many members as possible and would be delighted if everyone followed their principles.
[1] See for instance: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/24/there-are-rules-here/
That does make what he’s saying there cohere better. Of course, what he’s saying turns entirely on the ambiguity he’s playing on (which I suspected): religion in the sense of concrete historical/social human practices and religion in the sense of identifying strongly with and thus not questioning your principles. Never a good idea to hang your hat on the coatrack of suggestive language games. Or, you know, outrageous bullshit.
I almost think it makes it worse, finding a coherent meaning—-which is so silly.
Then there’s this:
> Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in its shadow. Copernicus and Darwin both made discoveries of this type.
> [18] The principles defining a religion have to be mistaken. Otherwise anyone might adopt them, and there would be nothing to distinguish the adherents of the religion from everyone else.
First, anything can be either literally or metaphorically described as a religion, so that makes this an empty principle, since it either covers nothing or everything or both. (“Cheesecake is my religion.” Etc.)
Second, the footnote is literally impenetrable to me. Honestly. I can discern no coherent meaning. That everyone could adopt a principle or belief does not mean it must be false just because everyone uniformly and indistinguishably believes it and therefore nobody disbelieves it. Whether people can be distinguished from one another with respect to some belief (say, that in base 10 arithmetic that 1+1=2) has nothing to do with the truth vel non of that belief.
And honestly, I am genuinely struggling to fathom a mind that could not only believe that statement but believe it so deeply that they breezily announce it as obviously true. So it’s funny that this is the next paragraph:
> What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think?
The only, and I mean, literally only, interpretation that I can come up with is that PG is using “religion” and “religious” in enough different ways that when he mixes them, as it seems to do here, he doesn’t notice. Or he means them ONLY in the sense of “too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think.” But I have a very strong suspicion that he is definitely not using them only in that way.