Look, Yazata, the philosopher in you already knows the problem with the posture you've struck: When your quasi-affirmative justification is a negative juxtaposition against infinity, you're probably doing it wrong. Let's actually work kind of backwards for a moment:
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"I sense some preexisting commitments on your part to philosophical positions that I suspect that you can't justify to my satisfaction. Which would seem to put you in the same position as the religious person is in relation to the atheist." — This is a familiar manner, trying to reposition the arguments in order to demand of others what one is not able to provide for their own. Of course Capracus cannot not justify his argument to insatiable satisfaction; nobody can. It's a fallacious standard intended to
equivocate by raising your position while diminishing his. There are days when Capracus is out on a limb, but "a society that encourages the acceptance of institutional religious fantasy" is just not so precarious a branch as you would pretend.
― There is actually a larger discussion to be had about the value of words in argumentation. I've encountered it before, at Sciforums, and sometimes it seems as if for some people the point is some manner of equivocation, that one measures their own not according to its merit, but against someone else's. In this case, the argument that your fallacy "would seem to put [Capracus] in the same position as the religious person is in relation to the atheist" is correct as far as it goes: We can fallaciously box Capracus in, such that your equivocation might seem accurate. Beyond that, the general problem runs as if one person requires that everyone else is behaving as the one; discourse at Sciforums is shot through with this, to the point that when things start looking like Wimbledon heads watching the back and forth of a purely political he-said she-said in which truth and accuracy are irrelevant because the purpose is to craft an emotionally affecting pitch, well, right, that's the point. It is dynamic, solipsistic moral relativism, and it's not limited to any one subject, politic, or issue, as such; the phenomenon manifests more as a method, diversely applied. Yes, as I said, it's a larger discussion, but it is not unrelated to your effort to put Capracus "in the same position as the religious person is in relation to the atheist".
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"the philosopher in me makes me ask how you think that you can possibly know that religious ideas are fantasy" — Part of me wants to just say,
y'know, the Paradox of the Marathon makes a lot of sense until you let yourself get distracted by little details like the length of a stride or particular halfway, and just leave it at that. Still, the philosopher in you has slipped beyond a particular aspect of applicability. To wit, what do you want, such as how much of what neurological data from how many subjects? Or, perhaps, the idea that you and I should try a square-one culling starting with some notion of literalism, spending how much or little time on the point that no, Genesis does not accurately describe how the Universe came to be, &c. It just seems that would be extraneous for us, and perhaps the easiest expression is to wonder what you mean by "fantasy". Do I have to look up the old
Simpsons episode when Marge prays while in court? The actual joke in that one is that jurors scandalizing the point of her talking to an invisible someone she couldn't prove is there included people you see at church. Capracus might be asking a very broad question that is also too particular, but his pretense—("acceptance of institutional religious fantasy")—is not wrong, unless we use a preclusive definition such as you would seem to require. Consider, please,
historian Jeffrey Burton Russell↗:
The historical evidence can never be clear enough to know what really happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen), but the evidence as to what people believed to have happened is relatively clear. The concept—what people believed to have happened—is more important than what really did happen, because people act upon what they believe to be true.
If people are making decisions according to
beliefs that
cannot be shown true, yet are
maintained because they
cannot conclusively be refuted because they are
untestable, then we have a reasonable sketch of behavior decided according to fantasy. It's not the only sketch, but even if we skip past the exercise in what passes for Biblical literalism, it's more important to understand
your definition of fantasy.
Meanwhile, QAnon exploits uncertainty and fear derived from and defined within a religious or postreligious framework; these concerns are not unrelated to the Christianist culture wars against the human rights of women, homosexuals, and transgender; nor the similar crusades against evolution, medicine, astronomy, public health, literature and the arts, &c. And the whole lizard-people history does not come to be without religious belief, institutionalized religious belief, and the encouragement thereof. This is, of course, also part of what runs awry in Capracus' pretense, but that's a different question. Except it's not. We'll come back to it.
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"'Allows' is something different than 'encourages'. There's this thing (in the United States at least) called 'freedom of religion', which is a subset of 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of thought'. Those freedoms are very important to me, and I'm not willing to give them up lightly." — So, this is just weird. The first sentence, sure, whatever. The rest of it, though, is all yours. The thing, though, about the difference between allowing and encouraging is that you already know, so, really, come on. American presidents extol, and in Trump's case, exploit, the virtue of church and faith participation; in history, it wasn't just "dry" counties, but also places where commerce was restricted on certain days to a range of declared and enumerated essential needs, in order to accommodate some Christianist pretense of Sabbath; in one of the Southern states, the courts had to officially make some counties stop requiring elected office holders to publicly proclaim faith in God. We could go on, right? Such as rhetoric that pits human rights against the religious freedom of American Christians to refuse those human rights, and you can always remind us which pretense had institutional heritage on its side. Hey, right, there's that motto on our coin, "In God we trust". And, check it out: We just elected a Catholic president, and while that has spurred public discourse about proper churchgoing, the Catholic heritage of rape, murder, and general atrocity doesn't seem to be wrecking the institution. The difference between
"allows" and
"encourages"? A relevant point here, Yazata, is that you're well educated in subjects pertaining to religion and religious history, thus it feels kind of impossible that you don't know the American heritage encourages religious belief and participation, and prefers more institutional forms.
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"What would an atheist like yourself propose doing in that case? I sense a bit of authoritarianism lurking beneath the surface there, a desire to control what other people think and believe." — That is entirely yours, and, in working backward through the paragraphs, as we are, it stands out even more. But if we think about the scale of what Capracus suggests, "What would [you] propose doing in that case?" seems, even without regard to atheism, an utterly futile and nonsensical question. There really isn't a whole lot to be done that can't be summed up in the basic prospect of living faith: People need to constantly reassess their relationship to the fantastical beliefs influencing their decisions and priorities. Of the so-called faithless, they aren't, but not all crackpottery requires the fantastic, or, perhaps, the divinely or theistically fantastic. Still, compared to the generational, societal, at this point largely abstract question of what would anyone propose doing about the encouragement of "the acceptance of institutional religious fantasy", the bit of authoritarianism you sense is a product of your own imagination. There is not much to be done, because believers in certain manners of fantasy pretend no obligation to integrity, and, no, society has never really figured out what to do about that, in large part because it does not want to. This is an historical, collective-behavioral outcome. It is unclear to what degree any proposition that educating people, such that society gets a little bit smarter and passes some threshold at which we start relying more on reality and institutionally discourage nonsense and fantasy, is reliable, reasonable, or realistic.
