The Bonald has a choice little esssay on intrinsic failure modes.  Here is what he says about Christianity.

How about a Christian neighbor?  Better stay on your toes.  She might hear one too many times about tax collectors and prostitutes getting into heaven before priests, and it may trigger Moral Inversion Syndrome, and she’ll go around haranguing her fellow Christians about the many moral lessons they can learn from prostitutes.  This sort of thing is not the proper interpretation, but I’m afraid all Christians are prone to it.  We know that we’re all sinners, so we tend to imagine that spectacular sinners have some deeper spiritual awareness, or at least they’re not “hypocrites” like respectable Christians.

You’ll notice that the Bonald’s intrinsic religious failure modes look very much like a dumb critic’s strawman of the religion’s belief.  That is because the strawman  version of a belief is usually entropic.  A critic isn’t going to take the time and effort to put energy into making a belief he hates more nuanced and ordered.  Entropy is universal, so believers are prone to it to.  Intrinsic religious failure modes are when believers strawman themselves.

I have intuitions that I hope aren’t true but that probably are. Here are two of them.

• Life is a choice of failure modes.

• The strawman wins in the end.

They say that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. That means a lot of things. One of the things it means is that subtlety and nuance can’t survive in the full glare of the day. I don’t deny that subtlety exists. I myself can sometimes reason as subtly as a magician when I have a mind to. Even personal subtlety tends to suffer from attention, though. The more you think about and elaborate some subtle line of reasoning, the more complicated and lifeless it becomes. It only comes back to life if it collapses into some basic insight. Further, even satisfying nuances are difficult to maintain. Over time, you forget them and fall back into the simple-minded strawman version. You have to rediscover the nuances over and over again.

In physics, what is possible at the quantum level, though unlikely, becomes a rigid impossibility at the classical level, through the tyranny of the law of averages. In the same way, each person’s difficulty in maintaining nuanced thought becomes a social impossibility. Averaged ideas are always strawmen.

Society-wide, nuance can exist when we aren’t thinking about it. Custom and tradition can be nuanced. That’s one reason we prefer them to rational programs, which always have to be stupid in practice. Nuance can exist in obscure corners of the society, or in intellectual discussions that most people roll their eyes at. Nuance can also be an armed truce between opposed strawmen.

(Armed truces often become customs and traditions over time. The trucial lines tend to lie roughly at nuanced points, which is another reason we prefer customs and traditions, and a reason why studying customs and traditions can be rewarding. (Liberalism was originally intended to be a kind of pre-emptive armed truce, but since the idea of skipping straight to the truce and avoiding the war is nuanced, liberalism has decayed into dogmas).)

Nuance can’t survive society’s attention. When an idea goes public, it becomes a strawman. Several years ago I predicted that if gay marriage became accepted, religious freedom for gay marriage dissenters would take a hit. Not because they can’t coexist. Conceptually, they can coexist as easy as pie. And not because gay marriage supporters are hippy Machiavels whose real goal all along was to put a stick in the eye of some little wedding chapel business up in Coeur-de-Alene. They aren’t. In fact, I am proud to say, within the ken of Google this is the first time the phrase ‘hippy Machiavel’ has ever appeared in print. But I was right anyhow, because I knew that the public mind couldn’t wrap its mind around a principled compromise.

Have you ever noticed that the prophets and apostles don’t emphasize exceptions to the rules?  They exist, the exceptions do.  But we don’t preach them.  Otherwise the exception would swallow the rule.  No instituation can serve two different cliches.

Democratic statesmanship is the art of convincing the public to fall off the other side of the horse this time, because this side is getting bruised.