This was a interesting and thought provoking series. Thanks for posting. I particularly enjoyed the discussion in Part III.
The one omission that I would have liked to see discussed to open discourse with the "silly" is a a clearer delineation between belief and actions. What is the saying I may have picked up on a billboard somewhere, character counts. People may hold wrong or silly beliefs but that does not condemn them to a world of ignorance. Ethically, someone who is a creationist or a does not accept gay marriage or something could be a much better person than what is held as non-silly. A case being an evangelical Christian treating gay people better than a noxious gay individual.
I wouldn’t get too caught up in the use of the word ‘silly’ otherwise you may end up proving the writers point
To be fair, to an outsider, which is how one should approach research like this, a great deal of supernatural beliefs do appear to be ‘silly’ whether it’s that the movement of the stars dictates your personality, that water has ‘memory’ and can treat illness (yet for some reason the water forgets all the fecal matter that’s ever been in it) or that a prayer will help you find your car keys. It is ‘silly.’ On paper these are silly notions. Of course if you believe in prayer then you want that to be respected, just as much as the astrologer or the homoeopathist even if the person who believes in one ‘silly’ idea rejects other ‘silly’ ideas for being, well, ‘silly.’
If we take the evangelical Christian in your example, if he is ‘cool with the gays’ but comes from a ‘silly in-group’ that isn’t okay with it, then his ‘coolness’ isn’t coming from the in-group, it is coming from elsewhere. Even if he’s rejecting the position of the in-group it, then that rejection must be stimulated by an experience contrary to that articulated within in-group. If it is generally accepted that not having a problem with someone’s sexuality (i.e, the out-group) is not ‘silly’ (so non heteronormative sexuality is simply variant rather than deviant), then his inference is coming from the ‘non-silly’ outgroup. However that’s exactly how in-groups change and evolve.
In terms of the ‘in-group’, it’s worth noting that no community can ever sustain itself without outside influence. It is impossible, even with Amazonian tribes, or Amish, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Truthers or whatever to remain hermetically sealed. Groups will always change and then label then old orthodoxy as ‘imperfect’ because any group that considers itself to be ‘a truth’ must maintain that infallibility. For example, as part of a paper I did some years ago, I looked into church bulletins, newspapers and such published around 100 years ago in the Glasgow area on the idea of women’s suffrage. It was very difficult to find any published information that when addressing the issue, addressed it favourably with some notable exceptions amongst the Quakers and some Methodists for example. Some Presbyterian diatribes against women, using biblical references to deny women the franchise had rhetoric worthy of John Knox. However come the granting of the vote in 1918 to some women, I could no longer find any reference to the matter. If there was a discussion, it wasn’t being disseminated in the same way. With the extension of the franchise to more women in the 1920’s it popped up again, but this time almost exclusively favourably and in at least a half dozen examples, favourably in the same parish newsletters and by the same ministers who previously opposed such measures. It takes time for new, external information to become internalised by the community group which is why on the issue of LGBT rights today, many church groups are simply not responding to outsiders or even to themselves on the matter rather than taking a positive or negative view. I’ve been involved with the LGBT rights movement from the best part of a decade, often with affirming churches and those ten years ago who were willing to lay down exactly why they had a problem with people being gay are now the groups who are now on the record as not wanting to talk about it, or not considering it important. Despite the fact that many churches condoned slavery and opposed women’s suffrage you will very rarely find their successor churches being candid about it, because reflection on the past proves fallibility; it taints ‘truth’. If mistakes were made in the past and if falsehoods were followed and practiced, how can one be assured that mistakes are not being made today?
To take a step away from religion and look at say 9/11 truthers, there is the wonderful story of Charlie Veitch, who was once the pin-up of the movement but now is publically against it. When he was asked if there were any psychological explanations for those who adhere to the conspiracy he suggested, quite insightfully that most have an obsession with victimhood and a hatred of ‘high achievers’ and people that get on with the world. He suggested that the movement allowed introverts to collectively become more independent and more vocal so it gives people a crutch. Given the interconnectivity of for example, global terror and the interconnectivity of our ability to respond to it, every new terrorist attack from the London bombings to the execution of Lee Rigby on the street feeds into a pre-existing framework.
Everything becomes connected and because they are connected to the ‘great lie’ then they themselves must be part of that lie.
However there a more sinister and dangerous result of in-groups ‘evolving’; they fragment. However fragmentation doesn’t necessarily weaken an idea. If we take god for example, there is one side who says ‘There is no god’ and that is it. On the subject of god, there isn’t one and that’s pretty much the end of the story. For those who say there is one (if not more) then you have an uncountable number of different explanations. Does the fact there is a myriad of different and often contradictory explanations for god weaken the idea of god? No. If anything it’s quite the contrary; ‘there are so many different beliefs there must be a connected truth to it’ tends to be the rather passive and saccharine response to the issue. After thousands of years of human existence majority rules on that one. But if we take for example the anti-medicine movement, well that’s always been there too. You still have a subset of people that exclusively pray or drink their own urine and generally reject germ theory, but most of the objections to the dangers of surgery and medicine are more modern. You may find that people who are practice homeopathy, or are anti-vaccine may move in the same circles or alternatively they may be opposed to each other’s ideas in theory (while also sharing a laugh at people who drink their own piss), but they are part of the same myriad of groups that mistrust medicine or believe in sinister pharmaceuticals, or doctors making money by making you sick and so forth to the extent that in some circles; ‘well there are so many different arguments and opinions that maybe there is a truth after all’ becomes a common expression when it comes to the idea that medicine is somehow ‘dangerous.’ Regardless of how much bigger those circles become and the more fragmented they become, they are still unified by a ‘silly’ notion that counters rationality. For the same reason, it is no coincidence that the GOP is both the home to and the breeding ground of nearly every single conspiracy theory concerning the age of the earth, the gays, the military, climate change, medicine, health care, education, ‘socialism’ and vaginas. Birds of a feather and all that!