I know that there are religious scientists and I think humans often compartmentalize beliefs in such a way that their belief about the supernatural doesn’t affect their assessment of real-world situations. I’ll even go further and say that often it seems like their belief affects their behavior much less than it logically ought to, with some (but not all) people who apparently sincerely believe in an all-seeing God and an afterlife still acting just like atheists in relevant situations. In this context, the fanatics are sometimes technically the more rational ones - I disagree with their premises, but their actions make sense if those premises are considered true.

I’m an atheist. I dated a woman once who believed in spirits. I think she experienced night terrors among other things and interpreted them as supernatural phenomena. It didn’t cause problems then but I was a lot younger and I think now I’m less tolerant of that sort of thing. But who knows - I was crazy about her so maybe if I meet a woman I’m crazy about like that again then I’ll tolerate anything.

More recently I’ve dated people who believe in a vague sort of life after death but never someone who practiced any religion. I think I would immediately rule out practicing religious people if I were going through a list (as when dating online) but if I met someone in person, really liked her, and then found out she was religious then I’m not sure what I would do. It would definitely be off-putting.

The problem for me isn’t the lifestyle differences but rather my impression that religious people are missing the point about the basic nature of existence, when it really should be obvious. It makes me feel like I’m patronizing them, because to be frank I don’t tend to think of them as my intellectual equals. (And I know that makes me sound like a pompous jerk.)

I completely quit reddit in protest after using it for over ten years when it threatened to replace the moderators of a small subreddit I participated in after that subreddit shut down during the API protests. I don’t actually care about the API myself (I never used anything other than old reddit) but I thought that reddit had no moral (as opposed to merely legal) right to take over something the mods had built and it merely hosted.

Lemmy is worse, but at least I’m following my principles.

You know those jokes about how people already in hell don’t know that they’re in hell? Relevant.

The computer that controlled all the doors refused to open any of them, including the door to the room in which it was physically located.

It wasn’t quite HAL 9000 because doors could still be opened from the inside, but control over the computer was regained only with the help of a locksmith.

In practice, no one will be hurt by this change, except for the pain caused by a defeat in the culture war. If I were you, I would consider risking my career over real harm done to individuals, but not over abstract harm done to an idea, even an idea I supported.

I think that the variety of leftists here, ranging all the way from people who don’t hate voting for Democrats to literal Stalinists, is one of the peculiarities of Lemmy that I find interesting. With that said, actually engaging with any of the ones more like the latter than the former is, as you’ve experienced, unrewarding.

Having $2,000 is better than having $2, but in practice I’m usually skeptical that plans to achieve an outcome like that will work out rather than failing and leaving both of us with $1. The manner in which the outcome would be achieved also matters - some of the plans seem to me like proposals to just steal the money and I object to that on moral rather than economic principles.

(I don’t mean to imply that people I disagree with think that stealing is OK, but rather that they and I don’t agree on the definition of stealing.)

I’m not one of those few completely uncompromising libertarians who don’t want public roads - I actually think the government should be doing all the things you list, and I pay my taxes. I do prefer individualistic ways of doing things, but I’m pragmatic and there are many problems for which the collectivist solution is the only practical solution. When I say I’m fiscally conservative, I mean that I think society should be more libertarian than it is now, not that it should be absolutely libertarian.

I’m someone who actually calls myself socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and that’s because my primary concern (in the terms of moral foundations theory) is the liberty/oppression axis. In other words, I think leaving people alone is a good thing, and while it’s not the only good thing and it needs to be balanced against other concerns, we should still be doing it more than we are now.

Two caveats:

1. I’m socially liberal because a free society requires tolerating even the people you hate. This is hard, and even many people who consider themselves tolerant because they simply don’t hate a particular group aren’t (and often don’t want to be) tolerant in this sense.

2. I’m economically conservative because the freedom to act without government interference even in an economic context has great inherent worth (but I’ll repeat here that I don’t value it to the exclusion of all else) but also because the free market usually does a better job than central planning at making everyone prosperous. I don’t care much about wealth inequality - a world in which I have two dollars and you have two million dollars is a better place than a world in which we both have just one dollar.

Edit: in practice I always end up voting for moderate Democrats at the national level, both because I think social issues are generally more important than economic issues and because neither party usually does what I would want regarding economic issues. However, I have more options at the state and local level.