A medieval monk and a modern AI safety researcher walking into a bar. The monk knows he's religious. The researcher insists he's purely rational. Yet both are constructing elaborate theories about an all-powerful entity that might bring about the end times. Who's more self-aware?
This cuts to the heart of modern secularism's greatest failure. In our rush to transcend religious thinking, we've lost the ability to recognize it.
The result? A society-wide blindspot that makes us more susceptible to religious-style thinking than ever before, just without the psychological guardrails that traditional religious frameworks provided.
Consider three modern movements:
AI doomerism, with its prophecies1 of all-powerful artificial minds judging humanity
Climate apocalypticism, with its narratives2 of sin and redemption
Effective Altruism, with its calculations3 of infinite utility that mirror indulgencecs
Each wraps itself in the language of rationality while executing fundamentally religious thought patterns. Yet the participants genuinely cannot see it. They're like fish who've convinced themselves they're birds, all while swimming deeper.
Your pastor knows they're operating within a belief system. Your atheist friend engaged in AI doomerism thinks they're practicing pure reason. This promotes less epistemological hygiene than even medieval scholasticism did. At least the scholastics knew they were doing theology.
When an evangelical Christian warns of the Second Coming, we recognize the religious pattern. When a rationalist warns of artificial superintelligence bringing about human extinction, we nod as if discussing mere engineering probabilities. Same structure, different aesthetics.
Pluralism offers a solution.4 By engaging seriously with multiple religious and philosophical frameworks, pluralism develops our pattern-recognition capabilities. Each new system helps you understand the fundamental structures of all of them, including your own native tongue.
This is why scholars of comparative religion often display more genuine rationality than militant atheists. They've developed the mental frameworks to recognize belief systems in action, including their own.
The strict secularist, meanwhile, is often like someone insisting they have no accent while speaking with a thick regional dialect.
Christian rapture → AI singularity
Salvation through Grace → Alignment through Safteyism
Religious asceticism → Dopamine fasting/weird diets5
Priestly class/Church Fathers → Experts/"Important Po(a)sters"
Excommunication → Cancel Culture
Daily prayer → GRWM6
The solution isn't to reject religious thinking; that's impossible given how deeply it's wired into human cognition. Instead, we need the self-awareness to recognize these patterns when they emerge, whether in traditional religious contexts or in seemingly secular domains.
Pluralism offers this pathway. By engaging with multiple belief systems, we develop the cognitive tools to recognize belief systems as such. This might sound counterintuitive (embracing multiple religious frameworks to become more rational), but that's precisely why it works.
The next time you hear someone insisting they're purely rational while prophesying about artificial superintelligence or calculating infinite utilities, remember: they are engaged in religious thinking more deeply7 than any medieval monk. At least the monk knew what he was doing.
The true mark of rationality isn't the absence of religious thinking; it's the awareness of when we're engaging in it.
read this book
by Joseph Blankholm8: Associate Professor. Ph.D., Columbia University. Professor of American Religion, Secularism and Atheism, Sociology and Anthropology of Religion.
Pluralism requires engagement with multiple ontologies and epistemologies. This engagement develops our capacity to recognize and understand different belief systems, including our own.
The pluralistic approach doesn't attempt to eliminate religious thinking, which appears to be innate to human cognition, but rather cultivates awareness of how belief systems operate. This self-awareness is crucial.
Without it, we risk falling into unconscious religious patterns while maintaining the illusion of pure rationality, potentially making us more susceptible to dogmatic thinking rather than less.
Throughout history, we've seen supposedly secular ideologies absorb religious patterns of thought, from Auguste Comte's "Religion of Humanity9" to modern transhumanist narratives about technological transcendence.
The difference is that pluralism gives us the tools to recognize and engage with these patterns honestly, rather than maintaining the fiction that we've somehow stepped outside the realm of belief entirely.
By abandoning secularism's attempt to transcend religious thinking, pluralism better serves the goals of secular society. Promoting genuine understanding across belief systems & fostering the self-awareness necessary to recognize our own assumptions and patterns of thought.
Medieval monks, who openly wrestled with faith and doubt, had more intellectual honesty about their own belief systems than modern rationalists who can't recognize they're engaging in religious thinking while calculating the odds of AI apocalypse to the fifth decimal place.