Roko’s Basilisk is much like Christian hell in that it’s not an introductory belief. (Ok hell can be but that’s hell for your enemies). Christianity reaches out with offers of healing (of the psychospiritual variety), moral guidance, proto anarchocommunism (outdated and rare in modern day), connection to heritage, and acceptance and support within empire. Fear of hell is meant to keep those in in and obedient, draw them deeper, and to fire them up to action or redirect their anger.

Roko’s Basilisk serves similar roles and can even serve as an insight to the social development of hell from thought experiment within a religious group to a memetic source of obedience, escalation, and terror even though internal leadership and authorities tried to shut it down. But for those deep in the ideology who are prone to infernal anxiety it makes perfect sense that they’d lose their shit over it