I apologize; earlier I deliberately glossed over a complicated thought process just to give the conclusion that maybe you could know, as opposed to explaining in full.
God has been known to speak to people through dreams, visions and gut feelings. That doesn’t mean God always answers when I ask questions, which probably has something to do with the weakness of my faith. You could ask and you could try to listen, and if God is willing to answer, and if you don’t ignore obvious evidence due to your own biases*, you could get an answer. But God has for whatever reason chosen to be rather taciturn (I can only think of one person I know who’s been sent a vision from God), so you also might not, and God might speak to one person about it but not everyone, leaving others to wonder if they can trust people’s claims, or to study the Bible and other relevant information to try to figure it out for themselves. And then there are people who just get stuff wrong and won’t listen, but insist they’re right, and insist God agrees with them, confusing anyone God hasn’t spoken to. Hence, if you receive an answer and listen (something that’s happened to me, but not nearly every time I ask a question—at least, not unless we count finding the answer after asking through running into it in a book or something), you’ll know, but there’s also a possibility of just not finding out.
*There’s a joke I can’t find about some Talmudic scholars who are arguing. They ask God, a voice booms out from the heavens which one is right, and the others fail to update.
I had to confront that one. Upvoted for being an objection a reasonable person should make.
Be familiar with how mental illnesses and other disorders that can affect thinking actually present. (Not just the DSM. Read what people with those conditions say about them.)
Be familiar with what messages from God are supposed to be like. (From Old Testament examples or Paul’s heuristic. I suppose it’s also reasonable to ascertain whether or not they fit the pattern for some other religion.)
Essentially, look at what your experiences best fit. That can be hard. But if your “visions” are highly disturbing and you become paranoid about your neighbors trying to kill you, it’s more likely schizophrenia than divine inspiration. This applies to other things as well.
Does it actually make sense? Is it a message saying something, and then another one of the same sort, proclaiming the opposite, so that to believe one requires disbelieving the other?
Is there anything you can do to increase the probability that you’re mentally healthy? Is your thyroid okay? How are your adrenals? Either could get sick in a way that mimics a mood disorder. Can you also consider whether your lifestyle’s not conducive to mental health? Sleep problems? Poor nutrition?
Run it by other people who know you well and would be people you would trust to know if you were mentally ill.
No certainties. Just ways to be a little more sure. And that leads into the next one.
Pick the most likely interpretation and go with it and see if your quality of life improves. See if you’re becoming a better person.
But if your “visions” are highly disturbing and you become paranoid about your neighbors trying to kill you, it’s more likely schizophrenia than divine inspiration.
“The angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt.”
Does it actually make sense?
I work in a psych hospital, and the delusional patients there uniformly believe that their delusions make sense.
Run it by other people
This is the most likely to work. The delusional people I know are aware that other people disagree with their delusions. Relatedly, there is great disagreement on the topic of religion.
“The angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt.”
Good point. Of course, this one does make a testable prediction, and as opposed to what might be more characteristic of a mental illness, the angel tells him there’s trouble, he avoids it and we have no further evidence of his getting any more such messages. That at least makes schizophrenia a much less likely explanation than just having a weird dream, so that’s what to try ruling out.
Be familiar with what messages from God are supposed to be like. (From Old Testament examples or Paul’s heuristic. I suppose it’s also reasonable to ascertain whether or not they fit the pattern for some other religion.)
I have to admit that I’m not familiar with Paul’s heuristic—what is it ?
As for the Old Testament, God gives out some pretty frightening messages in there, from “sacrifice your son to me” to “wipe out every man, woman, and child who lives in this general area”. I am reasonably sure you wouldn’t listen to a message like that, but why wouldn’t you ?
Pick the most likely interpretation and go with it and see if your quality of life improves. See if you’re becoming a better person.
I have heard this sentiment from other theists, but I still understand it rather poorly, I’m ashamed to admit… maybe it’s because I’ve never been religious, and thus I’m missing some context.
So, what do you mean by “a better person”; how do you judge what is “better” ? In addition, let’s imagine that you discovered that believing in, say, Buddhism made you an even better person. Would you listen to messages that appear to be Buddhist, and discard those that appear to be Christian but contradict Buddhism—even though you’re pretty sure that Christianity is right and Buddhism is wrong ?
I think I might be too tired to give this the response it deserves. If this post isn’t a good enough answer, ask me again in the morning.
I have to admit that I’m not familiar with Paul’s heuristic—what is it ?
That you can tell whether a spirit is good or evil by whether or not it says Jesus is Lord.
I have heard this sentiment from other theists, but I still understand it rather poorly, I’m ashamed to admit… maybe it’s because I’ve never been religious, and thus I’m missing some context.
Well, right here I mean that if you’ve narrowed it down to either schizophrenia or Christianity is true and God is speaking to you, if it’s the former, untreated, you expect to feel more miserable. If it’s the latter, by embracing God, you expect it’ll make your quality of life improve. “Better person” here means “person who maximizes average utility better”.
That you can tell whether a spirit is good or evil by whether or not it says Jesus is Lord.
Oh, I see, and the idea here is that the evil spirit would not be able to actually say “Jesus is Lord” without self-destructing, right ? Thanks, I get it now; but wouldn’t this heuristic merely help you to determine whether the message is coming from a good spirit or an evil one, not whether the message is coming from a spirit or from inside your own head ?
if it’s the former, untreated, you expect to feel more miserable.
I haven’t studied schizophrenia in any detail, but wouldn’t a person suffering from it also have a skewed subjective perception of what “being miserable” is ?
If it’s the latter, by embracing God, you expect it’ll make your quality of life improve.
Some atheists claim that their life was greatly improved after their deconversion from Christianity, and some former Christians report the same thing after converting to Islam. Does this mean that the Christian God didn’t really talk to them while they were religious, after all—or am I overanalyzing your last bullet point ?
“Better person” here means “person who maximizes average utility better”.
Understood, though I was confused for a moment there. When other people say “better person”, they usually mean something like “a person who is more helpful and kinder to others”, not merely “a happier person”, though obviously those categories do overlap.
I just lost my comment by hitting the wrong button. Not being too tired today, though, here’s what I think in new words:
Oh, I see, and the idea here is that the evil spirit would not be able to actually say “Jesus is Lord” without self-destructing, right ? Thanks, I get it now; but wouldn’t this heuristic merely help you to determine whether the message is coming from a good spirit or an evil one, not whether the message is coming from a spirit or from inside your own head ?
Yes. That’s why we have to look into all sorts of possibilities.
I haven’t studied schizophrenia in any detail, but wouldn’t a person suffering from it also have a skewed subjective perception of what “being miserable” is ?
Speaking here only as a layperson who’s done a lot of research, I can’t think of any indication of that. Rather, they tend to be pretty miserable if their psychosis is out of control (with occasional exceptions). One person’s biography that I read recounts having it mistaken for depression at first, and believing that herself since it fit. That said, conventional approaches to treating schizophrenia don’t help much/any with half of it, the half that most impairs quality of life. (Not that psychosis doesn’t, but as a quick explanation, they also suffer from the “negative symptoms” which include stuff like apathy, poor grooming and stuff. The “positive symptoms” are stuff like hearing voices and being delusional. In the rare* cases where medication works, it only treats positive symptoms and usually exacerbates negative symptoms. (Just run down a list of side-effects and a list of negative symptoms. It helps if you know jargon.) Hence, poor quality of life.) So it’s also possible that receiving treatment for a mental illness you actually have would fail to increase quality of life. Add in abuses by the system and it could even decrease it, so this is definitely a problem.
Understood, though I was confused for a moment there. When other people say “better person”, they usually mean something like “a person who is more helpful and kinder to others”, not merely “a happier person”, though obviously those categories do overlap.
Aris understood correctly.
*About a third of schizophrenics are helped by medication. Not rare, certainly, but that’s less than half. Guidelines for treating schizophrenia are irrational. I will elaborate if asked, with the caveat that it’s irrelevant and I’m not a doctor.
I generally expect that people who make an effort to be X will subsequently report that being X improves their life, whether we’re talking about “convert to Christianity” or “convert to Islam” or “deconvert from Christianity” or “deconvert from Islam.”
Interesting—the flip side is “the grass is always greener.” I am not at all surprised that other effects dominate sometimes, or even a good deal of the time, however.
People can identify as Christian while being confused about what that means.
Can you clarify? Is it your claim that these “confused” Christians are the only ones who experience improved lives upon deconversion? Or did you mean something else?
I’m saying people can believe that they are Christians, go to church, pray, believe in the existence of God and still be wrong about fundamental points of doctrine like “I require mercy, not sacrifice” or the two most important commands, leading to people who think being Christian means they should hate certain people. There are also people who conflate tradition and divine command, leading to groups that believe being Christian means following specific rules which are impractical in modern culture and not beneficial. I expect anyone like that to have an improved quality of life after they stop hating people and doing pointless things. I expect a quality of life even better than that if they stop doing the bad stuff but really study the Bible and be good people, with the caveat that quality of life for those people could be lowered by persecution in some times and places. (They could also end up persecuted for rejecting it entirely in other times and places. Or even the same ones.)
Basically, yeah, only if they’ve done something wrong in their interpretation of Scripture will they like being atheists better than being Christians.
My brain is interpreting that as “well, TRUE Christians wouldn’t be happier/better if they deconverted.” How is this not “No True Scotsman”?
Would you say you are some variety of Calvinist? I’m guessing not, since you don’t sound quite emphatic enough on this point. (For the Calvinist, it’s point of doctrine that no one can cease being a Christian—they must not have been elect in the first place. I expect you already know this, I’m saying it for the benefit of any following the conversation who are lucky enough to not have heard of Calvinism. Also, lots of fundamentalist leaning groups (e.g., Baptists) have a “once saved always saved” doctrine.)
I hope I’m not coming off confrontational; I had someone IRL tell me I must never have been a real christian not too long ago, and I found it very annoying—so I may be being a bit overly sensitive.
In the rare* cases where medication works, it only treats positive symptoms and usually exacerbates negative symptoms. … So it’s also possible that receiving treatment for a mental illness you actually have would fail to increase quality of life.
Could you elaborate on this point a bit ? As far as I understand, at least some of the positive symptoms may pose significant existential risks to the patient (and possibly those around him, depending on severity). For example, a person may see a car coming straight at him, and desperately try to dodge it, when in reality there’s no car. Or a person may fail to notice a car that actually exists. Or, in extreme cases, the person may believe that his neighbour is trying to kill him, take preemptive action, and murder an innocent. If I had symptoms like that, I personally would rather live with the negatives for the rest of my life, rather than living with the vastly increased risk that I might accidentally kill myself or harm others—even knowing that I might feel subjectively happier until that happens.
Aris understood correctly.
Ok, that makes sense: by “becoming a better person”, you don’t just mean “a happier person”, but also “a person who’s more helpful and nicer to others”; and you choose to believe things that make you such a person.
I have to admit, this mode of thought is rather alien to me, and thus I have a tough time understanding it. To me, this sounds perilously close to wishful thinking. To use an exaggerated example, I would definitely feel happier if I knew that I had a million dollars in the bank. Having a million dollars would also empower me to be a better person, since I could donate at least some of it to charity, or invest it in a school, etc. However, I am not going to go ahead and believe that I have a million dollars, because… well… I don’t.
In addition, there’s a question of what one sees as being “better”. As we’d talked about earlier, at least some theists do honestly believe that persecuting gay people and forcing women to wear burqas is a good thing to do (and a moral imperative). Thus, they will (presumably) interpret any gut feelings that prompt them to enforce the burqa ordinances even harder as being good and therefore godly and true. You (and I), however, would do just the opposite. So, we both use the same method but arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions; doesn’t this mean that the method may be flawed ?
Short version: unsurprising because of things like this. People can identify as Christian while being confused about what that means.
My main objection to this line of reasoning is that it involves the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Who is to say (other than the Pope, perhaps) what being a Christian “really means” ? The more conservative Christians believe that feminism is a sin, whereas you do not; but how would you convince an impartial observer that you are right and they are wrong ? You could say, “clearly such attitudes harm women, and we shouldn’t be hurting people”, but they’d just retort with, “yes, and incarcerating criminals harms the criminals to, but it must be done for the greater good, because that’s what God wants; He told me so”.
In addition, it is not the case that all people who leave Christianity (be it for another religion, or for no religion at all) come from such extreme sects as the one you linked to. For example, Julia Sweeny (*), a prominent atheist, came from a relatively moderate background, IIRC. More on this below:
Surprising. My model takes a hit here. Do you have links to firsthand accounts of this?
I don’t have any specific links right now (I will try to find some later), but apparently there is a whole website dedicated to the subject. Wikipedia also has a list. I personally know at least two people who converted from relatively moderate versions of Christianity to Wicca and Neo-Paganism, and report being much happier as the result, though obviously this is just anecdotal information and not hard data. In general, though, my impression was that religious conversions are relatively common, though I haven’t done any hard research on the topic. There’s an interesting-looking paper on the topic that I don’t have access to… maybe someone else here does ?
(*) I just happened to remember her name off the top of my head, because her comedy routine is really funny.
Yeah. You could feel unhappy a lot more if you take the pills usually prescribed to schizophrenics because side-effects of those pills include mental fog and weight gain. You could also be a less helpful person to others because you would be less able to do thinks if you’re on a high enough dose to “zombify” you. Also, Erving Goffman’s work shows that situations where people are in an institution, as he defines the term, cause people to become stupider and less capable. (Kudos to the mental health system for trying to get people out of those places faster—most people who go in get out after a little while now, as opposed to the months it usually took when he was studying. However, the problems aren’t eliminated and his research is still applicable.) Hence, it could make you a worse and unhappier person to undergo treatment.
(and possibly those around him, depending on severity)
NO. That takes a BIG NO. Severity of mental illness is NOT correlated with violence. It’s correlated with self-harm, but not hurting other people.
Mental illness is correlated (no surprise here) with being abused and with substance abuse. Both of those are correlated with violence, leading to higher rates of violence among the mentally ill. Even when not corrected for, the rate isn’t that high and the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of it. But when those effects ARE corrected for, mental illness does not, by itself, cause violence.
At all. End of story. Axe-crazy villains in the movies are unrealistic and offensive portrayals of mental illness. /rant
I have to admit, this mode of thought is rather alien to me, and thus I have a tough time understanding it. To me, this sounds perilously close to wishful thinking. To use an exaggerated example, I would definitely feel happier if I knew that I had a million dollars in the bank. Having a million dollars would also empower me to be a better person, since I could donate at least some of it to charity, or invest it in a school, etc. However, I am not going to go ahead and believe that I have a million dollars, because… well… I don’t.
This mode of thought is alien to me too, since I wasn’t advocating it. I’m confused about how you could come to that conclusion. I have been unclear, it seems.
(Seriously, what?)
Okay, so I mean, if you think you only want to fulfill your own selfish desires, and then become a Christian, and even though you don’t want to, decide it’s right to be nice to other people and spend time praying, and then after a while learn that it makes you really happy to be nice and happier than you’ve ever been before to pray. That’s what I meant.
In addition, there’s a question of what one sees as being “better”. As we’d talked about earlier, at least some theists do honestly believe that persecuting gay people and forcing women to wear burqas is a good thing to do (and a moral imperative). Thus, they will (presumably) interpret any gut feelings that prompt them to enforce the burqa ordinances even harder as being good and therefore godly and true. You (and I), however, would do just the opposite. So, we both use the same method but arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions; doesn’t this mean that the method may be flawed ?
Yes. It’s only to be used as an adjunct to thinking things through, not the end-all-be-all of your strategy for deciding what to do in life.
The more conservative Christians believe that feminism is a sin, whereas you do not; but how would you convince an impartial observer that you are right and they are wrong ?
My argument isn’t against people who think feminism is sinful (would you like links to sane, godly people espousing the idea without being hateful?) but with the general tenor of the piece. See below.
My main objection to this line of reasoning is that it involves the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Who is to say (other than the Pope, perhaps) what being a Christian “really means” ?
Well, not the Pope, certainly. He’s a Catholic. But I thought a workable definition of “Christian” was “person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ and tries to follow his teachings”, in which case we have a pretty objective test. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors and be merciful. He repeatedly behaved politely toward women of poor morals, converting them with love and specifically avoiding condemnation. Hence, people who are hateful or condemn others are not following his teachings. If that was a mistake, that’s different, just like a rationalist could be overconfident—but to systematically do it and espouse the idea that you should be hateful clearly goes against what Jesus taught as recorded in the Bible. Here’s a quote from the link:
If I were a king, I’d make a law that any woman who wore a miniskirt would go to jail. I’m not kidding!
Compare it with a relevant quote from the Bible, which has been placed in different places in different versions, but the NIVUK (New International Version UK) puts it at the beginning of John 8:
The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group
4 and said to Jesus, Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.
5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?
6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.
7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.
8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.
10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, Woman, where are they? Has no-one condemned you?
11 No-one, sir, she said. Then neither do I condemn you, Jesus declared. Go now and leave your life of sin.
So, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that, whether or not Christianity is correct and whether or not it’s right to lock people up for wearing miniskirts, that attitude is unChristian.
I don’t have any specific links right now (I will try to find some later), but apparently there is a whole website dedicated to the subject. Wikipedia also has a list. I personally know at least two people who converted from relatively moderate versions of Christianity to Wicca and Neo-Paganism, and report being much happier as the result, though obviously this is just anecdotal information and not hard data.
… I thought a workable definition of “Christian” was “person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ and tries to follow his teachings”, in which case we have a pretty objective test. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors and be merciful. He repeatedly behaved politely toward women of poor morals, converting them with love and specifically avoiding condemnation. Hence, people who are hateful or condemn others are not following his teachings. If that was a mistake, that’s different, just like a rationalist could be overconfident—but to systematically do it and espouse the idea that you should be hateful clearly goes against what Jesus taught as recorded in the Bible.
I seem to be collecting downvotes, so I’ll shut up about this shortly. But to me, anyway, this still sounds like No True Scotsman. I suspect that nearly all Christians will agree with your definition (excepting Mormons and JW’s, but I assume you added “divinity” in there to intentionally exclude them). However, I seriously doubt many of them will agree with your adjudication. Fundamentalists sincerely believe that the things they do are loving and following the teachings of Jesus. They think you are the one putting the emphasis on the wrong passages. I personally happen to think you probably are much more correct than they are; but the point is neither one of us gets to do the adjudication.
I think this is missing the point: they believe that, but they’re wrong. The fact that they’re wrong is what causes them distress. If you’d like, we can taboo the word “Christian” (or just end the conversation, as you suggest).
I wouldn’t go disagreeing with him; I’d try performing a double-blind test of his athletic ability while wearing different pairs of socks. It just seems like the sort of thing that’s so simple to design and test that I don’t know if I could resist. I’d need three people and a stopwatch...
I suspect that after the third or fifth such athlete, you’d develop the ability to resist, and simply have your opinion about his or her belief about socks, which you might or might not share depending on the circumstances.
Uh-oh, that’s a bad sign. If someone on LessWrong thinks something like that, I’d better give it credence. But now I’m confused because I can’t think what has given you that idea. Ergo, there appears to be evidence that I’ve not only made a mistake in thinking, but made one unknowingly, and failed to realize afterward or even see that something was wrong.
So, this gives me two questions and I feel like an idiot for asking them, and if this site had heretofore been behaving like other internet sites this would be the point where the name-calling would start, but you guys seem more willing than average to help people straighten things out when they’re confused, so I’m actually going to bother asking:
What do you mean by “basic premise” and “can’t question” in this context? Do you mean that I can’t consider his nonexistence as a counterfactual? Or is there a logical impossibility in my conception of God that I’ve failed to notice?
Can I have specific quotes, or at least a general description, of when I’ve been evasive? Since I’m unaware of it, it’s probably a really bad thinking mistake, not actual evasiveness—that or I have a very inaccurate self-concept.
Actually, no possibility seems good here (in the sense that I should revise my estimate of my own intelligence and/or honesty and/or self-awareness down in almost every case), except that something I said yesterday while in need of more sleep came out really wrong. Or that someone else made a mistake, but given that I’ve gotten several downvotes (over seventeen, I think) in the last couple of hours, that’s either the work of someone determined to downvote everything I say or evidence that multiple people think I’m being stupid.
(You know, I do want to point out that the comment about testing his lucky socks was mostly a joke. I do assign a really low prior probability to the existence of lucky socks anywhere, in case someone voted me down for being an idiot instead of for missing the point and derailing the analogy. But testing it really is what I would do in real life if given the chance.)
This isn’t a general objection to my religion, is it? (I’m guessing no, but I want to make sure.)
There is a man in the sky who created everything and loves all of us, even the 12-year-old girl getting gang-raped to death right now. His seeming contradictions are part of a grander plan that we cannot fathom.
Not how I would have put that, but mostly ADBOC this. (I wouldn’t have called him a man, nor would I have singled out the sky as a place to put him. But yes, I do believe in a god who created everything and loves all, and ADBOC the bit about the 12-year-old—would you like to get into the Problem of Evil or just agree to disagree on the implied point even though that’s a Bayesian abomination? And agree with the last sentence.)
Can’t, won’t, unwilling to. Yes, it’s possible for you to question it, but you aren’t doing so.
I’d ask you what would look different if I did, but I think you’ve answered this below.
Sure you can. How is a universe not set in motion by God notably different from one that is?
You think I’m one of those people. Let me begin by saying that God’s existence is an empirical fact which one could either prove or disprove.
I worry about telling people why I converted because I fear ridicule or accusations of lying. However, I’ll tell you this much: I suddenly became capable of feeling two new sensations, neither of which I’d felt before and neither of which, so far as I know, has words in English to describe it. Sensation A felt like there was something on my skin, like dirt or mud, and something squeezing my heart, and was sometimes accompanied by a strange scent and almost always by feelings of distress. Sensation B never co-occurred with Sensation A. I could be feeling one, the other or neither, and could feel them to varying degrees. Sensation B felt relaxing, but also very happy and content and jubilant in a way and to a degree I’d never quite been before, and a little like there was a spring of water inside me, and like the water was gold-colored, and like this was all I really wanted forever, and a bit like love. After becoming able to feel these sensations, I felt them in certain situations and not in others. If one assumed that Sensation A was Bad and Sensation B was Good, then they were consistent with Christianity being true. Sometimes they didn’t surprise me. Sometimes they did—I could get the feeling that something was Bad even if I hadn’t thought so (had even been interested in doing it) and then later learn that Christian doctrine considered it Bad as well.
I do not think a universe without God would look the same. I can’t see any reason why a universe without God would behave as if it had an innate morality that seems, possibly, somewhat arbitrary. I would expect a universe without God to work just like I thought it did when I was an atheist. I would expect there to be nothing wrong (no signal saying Bad) with… well, anything, really. A universe without God has no innate morality. The only thing that could make morality would be human preference, which changes an awful lot. And I certainly wouldn’t expect to get a Good signal on the Bible but a Bad signal on other holy books.
So. That’s the better part of my evidence, such as it is.
If one assumed that Sensation A was Bad and Sensation B was Good, then they were consistent with Christianity being true. Sometimes they didn’t surprise me. Sometimes they did—I could get the feeling that something was Bad even if I hadn’t thought so (had even been interested in doing it) and then later learn that Christian doctrine considered it Bad as well.
This would be considerably more convincing if Christianity were a unified movement.
Suppose there existed only three religions in the world, all of which had a unified dogma and only one interpretation of it. Each of them had a long list of pretty specific doctrinal points, like one religion considering Tarot cards bad and another thinking that they were fine. If your Good and Bad sensations happened to precisely correspond to the recommendations of one particular religion, even in the cases where you didn’t actually know what the recommendations were beforehand, then that would be some evidence for the religion being true.
However, in practice there are a lot of religions, and a lot of different Christian sects and interpretations. You’ve said that you’ve chosen certain interpretations instead of others because that’s the interpretation that your sensations favored. Consider now that even if your sensations were just a quirk of your brain and mostly random, there are just so many different Christian sects and varying interpretations that it would be hard not to find some sect or interpretation of Christian doctrine who happened to prescribe the same things as your sensations do.
Then you need to additionally take into account ordinary cognitive flaws like confirmation bias: once you begin to believe in the hypothesis that your sensations reflect Christianity’s teachings, you’re likely to take relatively neutral passages and read into them doctrinal support for your position, and ignore passages which say contrary things.
In fact, if I’ve read you correctly, you’ve explicitly said that you choose the correct interpretation of Biblical passages based on your sensations, and the Biblical passages which are correct are the ones that give you a Good feeling. But you can’t then say that Christianity is true because it’s the Christian bits that give you the good feeling—you’ve defined “Christian doctrine” as “the bits that give a good feeling”, so “the bits that give a good feeling” can’t not be “Christian doctrine”!
Furthermore, our subconscious models are often accurate but badly understood by our conscious minds. For many skills, we’re able to say what’s the right or wrong way of doing something, but be completely unable to verbalize the reason. Likewise, you probably have a better subconscious model of what would be “typical” Christian dogma than you are consciously aware of. It is not implausible that you’d have a subconscious process making guesses on what would be a typical Christian response to something, giving you good or bad sensation based on that, and often guessing right (especially since, as noted before, there’s quite a lot of leeway in how a “Christian response” is defined).
For instance, you say that you hadn’t thought of Tarot cards being Bad before. But the traditional image of Christianity is that of being strongly opposed to witchcraft, and Tarot cards are used for divination, which is strongly related to witchcraft. Even if you hadn’t consciously made that connection, it’s obvious enough that your subconscious very well could have.
I don’t think the conclusion that the morality described by sensations A/B is a property of the universe at large has been justified. You mention that the sensations predict in advance what Christian doctrine describes as moral or immoral before you know directly what that doctrine says, but that strikes me as being an investigation method that is not useful, for two reasons:
Christian culture is is very heavily permeated throughout most English-speaking cultures. A person who grows up in such a culture will have a high likelihood of correctly guessing Christianity’s opinion on any given moral question, even if they haven’t personally read the relevant text.
More generally, introspection is a very problematic way of gathering data. Many many biases, both obvious and subtle, come into play, and make your job way more difficult. For example: Did you take notes on each instance of feeling A or B when it occurred, and use those notes (and only those notes) later when validating them against Christian doctrine? If not, you are much more likely to remember hits than misses, or even to after-the-fact readjust misses into hits; human memory is notorious for such things.
A universe without God has no innate morality. The only thing that could make morality would be human preference, which changes an awful lot.
In a world entirely without morality, we are constantly facing situations where trusting another person would be mutually beneficial, but trusting when the other person betrays is much worse than mutual betrayal. Decision theory has a name for this type of problem: Prisoner’s Dilemma. The rational strategy is to defect, which makes a pretty terrible world.
But when playing an indefinite number of games, it turns out that cooperating, then punishing defection is a strong strategy in an environment of many distinct strategies. That looks a lot like “turn the other cheek” combined with a little bit of “eye for an eye.” Doesn’t the real world behavior consistent with that strategy vaguely resemble morality?
In short, decision theory suggests that material considerations can justify a substantial amount of “moral” behavior.
Regarding your sensations A and B, from the outside perspective it seems like you’ve been awfully lucky that your sense of right and wrong match your religious commitments. If you believed Westboro Baptist doctrine but still felt sensations A and B at the same times you feel them now, then you’d being doing sensation A behavior substantially more frequently. In other words, I could posit that you have a built-in morality oracle, but why should I believe that the oracle should be labelled Christian? If I had the same moral sensations you do, why shouldn’t I call it rationalist morality?
If you believed Westboro Baptist doctrine but still felt sensations A and B at the same times you feel them now,
...I became a Christian and determined my religious beliefs based on sensations A and B. Why would I believe in unsupported doctrine that went against what I could determine of the world? I just can’t see myself doing that. My sense of right and wrong match my religious commitments because I chose my religious commitments so they would fit with my sense of right and wrong.
but why should I believe that the oracle should be labelled Christian?
Because my built-in morality oracle likes the Christian Bible.
Doesn’t the real world behavior consistent with that strategy vaguely resemble morality?
It’s sufficient to explain some, but not all, morality. Take tarot cards, for example. What was there in the ancestral environment to make those harmful? That just doesn’t make any sense with your theory of morality-as-iterated-Prisoner’s-Dilemma.
If you picked a sect based on your moral beliefs, then that is evidence that your Christianity is moral. It is not evidence that morality is your Christianity (i.e. “A implies B” is not equivalent “B implies A”).
And if playing with tarot cards could open a doorway for demons to enter the world (or whatever wrong they cause), it seems perfectly rational to morally condemn tarot cards. I don’t morally condemn tarot cards because I think they have the same mystical powers as regular playing cards (i.e. none). Also, I’m not intending to invoke “ancestral environment” when I invoke decision theory.
And if playing with tarot cards could open a doorway for demons to enter the world (or whatever wrong they cause), it seems perfectly rational to morally condemn tarot cards.
But that’s already conditional on a universe that looks different from what most atheists would say exists. If you see proof that tarot cards—or anything else—summon demons, your model of reality takes a hit.
If you picked a sect based on your moral beliefs, then that is evidence that your Christianity is moral. It is not evidence that morality is your Christianity (i.e. “A implies B” is not equivalent “B implies A”).
If tarot cards have mystical powers, I absolutely need to adjust my beliefs about the supernatural. But you seemed to assert that decision theory can’t say that tarot are immoral in the universes where they are actually dangerous.
If you picked a sect based on your moral beliefs, then that is evidence that your Christianity is moral. It is not evidence that morality is your Christianity (i.e. “A implies B” is not equivalent “B implies A”).
I don’t understand. Can you clarify?
Alice has a moral belief that divorce is immoral. This moral belief is supported by objective evidence. She is given a choice to live in Distopia, where divorce is permissible by law, and Utopia, where divorce is legally impossible. For the most part, Distopia and Utopia are very similar places to live. Predictably, Alice chooses to live in Utopia. The consistency between Alice’s (objectively true) morality and Utopian law is evidence that Utopia is moral. It is not evidence that Utopia is the cause of Alice’s morality (i.e. is not evidence that morality is Utopian—the grammatical ordering of phrases does not help making my point).
But you seemed to assert that decision theory can’t say that tarot are immoral in the universes where they are actually dangerous.
Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, that does make sense. Decision theory WOULD assert it, but to believe they’re immoral requires belief in some amount of supernatural something, right? Hence it makes no sense under what my prior assumptions were (namely, that there was nothing supernatural).
Alice has a moral belief that divorce is immoral. This moral belief is supported by objective evidence. She is given a choice to live in Distopia, where divorce is permissible by law, and Utopia, where divorce is legally impossible. For the most part, Distopia and Utopia are very similar places to live. Predictably, Alice chooses to live in Utopia. The consistency between Alice’s (objectively true) morality and Utopian law is evidence that Utopia is moral. It is not evidence that Utopia is the cause of Alice’s morality (i.e. is not evidence that morality is Utopian—the grammatical ordering of phrases does not help making my point).
Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, that does make sense. Decision theory WOULD assert it, but to believe they’re immoral requires belief in some amount of supernatural something, right? Hence it makes no sense under what my prior assumptions were (namely, that there was nothing supernatural).
Accepting the existence of the demon portal should not impact your disbelief in a supernatural morality.
Anyways, the demons don’t even have to be supernatural. First hypothesis would be hallucination, second would be aliens.
I don’t see that decision theory cares why an activity is dangerous. Decision theory seems quite capable of imposing disincentives for poisoning (chemical danger) and cursing (supernatural danger) in proportion to their dangerousness and without regard to why they are dangerous.
The whole reason I’m invoking decision theory is to suggest that supernatural morality is not necessary to explain a substantial amount of human “moral” behavior.
You were not entirely clear, but you seem to be taking these as signals of things being Bad or Good in the morality sense, right? Ok so it feels like there is an objective morality. Let’s come up with hypotheses:
You have a morality that is the thousand shards of desire left over by an alien god. Things that were a good idea (for game theory, etc reasons) to avoid in the ancestral environment tend to feel good so that you would do them. Things that feel bad are things you would have wanted to avoid. As we know, an objective morality is what a personal morality feels like from the inside. That is, you are feeling the totally natural feelings of morality that we all feel. Why you attached special affect to the bible, I suppose that’s the affect hueristic: you feel like the bible is true and it is the center of your belief or something, and that goodness gets confused with a moral goodness. This is all hindsight, but it seems pretty sound.
Or it could be Jesus-is-Son-of-a-Benevolent-Love-Agent-That-Created-the-Universe. I guess God is sending you signals to say what sort of things he likes/doesn’t like? Is that the proposed mechanism for morality? I don’t know enough about the theory to say much more.
Ok now let’s consider the prior. The complex loving god hypothesis is incredibly complicated. Minds are so complex we can’t even build one yet. It would take a hell of a lot more than your feeling-of-morality evidence to even raise this to our attention. A lot more than any scientific hypothesis has ever collected, I would say. You must have other evidence, not only to overcome the prior, but all the evidence against a loving god who intelligently arranged anything,
Anyways, It sounds like you were primarily a moral nihilist before your encounter with the god-prescribes-a-morality hypothesis. Have you read Eliezers metaethics stuff? it deals the with subject of morality in a neutral universe quite well.
I’m afraid I don’t see why you call your reward-signal-from-god is an “objective morality” It sounds like the best course of action would be to learn the mechanism and seize control of it like AIXI would.
I (as a human) already have a strong morality, so if I figured out that the agent responsible for all of the evil in the universe were directly attempting to steer me with a subtle reward signal, I’d be pissed. It’s interesting that you didn’t have that reaction. I guess that’s the moral nihilism thing. You didn’t know you had your own morality.
The complex loving god hypothesis is incredibly complicated. Minds are so complex we can’t even build one yet.
There are two problems with this argument. First, each individual god might be very improbable, but that could be counterbalanced by the astronomical number of possible gods (e.g. consider all possible tweaks to the holy book), so you can argue apriori against specific flavors of theism but not against theism in general. Second, if Eliezer is right and AI can develop from a simple seed someone can code up in their garage, that means powerful minds don’t need high K-complexity. A powerful mind (or a program that blossoms into one) could even be simpler than physics as we currently know it, which is already quite complex and seems to have even more complexity waiting in store.
IMO a correct argument against theism should focus on the “loving” part rather than the “mind” part, and focus on evidence rather than complexity priors. The observed moral neutrality of physics is more probable if there’s no moral deity. Given what we know about evolution etc., it’s hard to name any true fact that makes a moral deity more likely.
I’m not sure that everything in my comment is correct. But I guess LW could benefit from developing an updated argument against (or for) theism?
Your argument about K-complexity is a decent shorthand but causes people to think that this “simplicity” thing is baked into the universe (universal prior) as if we had direct access to the universe (universal prior, reference machine language) and isn’t just another way of saying it’s more probable after having updated on a ton of evidence. As you said it should be about evidence not priors. No one’s ever seen a prior, at best a brain’s frequentist judgment about what “priors” are good to use when.
Second, if Eliezer is right and AI can develop from a simple seed someone can code up in their garage, that means powerful minds don’t need high K-complexity.
That may be somewhat misleading. A seed AI, denied access to external information, will be a moron. Yet the more information it takes into memory the higher the K-complexity of the thing, taken as a whole, is.
You might be able to code a relatively simple AI in your garage, but if it’s going to be useful it can’t stay simple.
ETA: Also if you take the computer system as a whole with all of the programming libraries and hardware arrangements—even ‘hello world’ would have high K-complexity. If you’re talking about whatsoever produces a given output on the screen in terms of a probability mass I’m not sure it’s reasonable to separate the two out and deal with K-complexity as simply a manifestation of high level APIs.
For every every program that could be called a mind, there are very very very many that are not.
Eliezer’s “simple” seed AI is simple compared to an operating system (which people code up in their garages), not compared to laws of physics.
As long as we continue to accept occams razor, there’s no reason to postulate fundamental gods.
Given that a god exists by other means (alien singularity), I would expect it to appear approximately moral, because it would have created me (or modified me) with approximately it’s own morality. I assume that god would understand the importance of friendly intelligence. So yeah, the apparent neutrality is evidence against the existence of anything like a god.
Eliezer’s “simple” seed AI is simple compared to an operating system (which people code up in their garages), not compared to laws of physics.
Fair point, but I think you need lots of code only if you want the AI to run fast, and K-complexity doesn’t care about speed. A slow naive implementation of “perfect AI” should be about the size of the math required to define a “perfect AI”. I’d be surprised if it were bigger than the laws of physics.
You’re right; AIXI or whatever is probably around the same complexity as physics. I bet physics is a lot simpler than it appears right now tho.
Now I’m unsure that a fundamental intelligence even means anything. AIXI, for example is IIRC based on bayes and occam induction, who’s domain is cognitive engines within universes more or less like ours. What would a physics god optimising some morality even be able to see and do? It sure wouldn’t be constrained by bayes and such. Why not just replace it with a universe that is whatever morality maximised; max(morality) is simpler than god(morality) almost no matter how simple god is. Assuming a physics god is even a coherent concept.
In our case, assuming a fundamental god is coherent, the “god did it” hypothesis is strictly defeated (same predictions, less theory) by the “god did physics” hypothesis, which is strictly defeated by the “physics” hypothesis. (becuase physics is a simpler morality than anything else that would produce our world, and if we use physics, god doesn’t have to exist)
That leaves us with only alien singularity gods, which are totally possible, but don’t exist here by the reasoning I gave in parent.
I bet physics is a lot simpler than it appears right now tho.
That’s a reasonable bet. Another reasonable bet is that “laws of physics are about as complex as minds, but small details have too little measure to matter”.
Why not just replace it with a universe that is whatever morality maximised; max(morality) is simpler than god(morality) almost no matter how simple god is.
Well, yeah. Then I guess the question is whether our universe is a byproduct of computing max(morality) for some simple enough “morality” that’s still recognizable as such. Will_Newsome seems to think so, or at least that’s the most sense I could extract from his comments...
Friendly intelligence is not particularly important when the intelligence in question is significantly less powerful an optimizer than its creator. I’m not really sure what would motivate a superintelligence to create entities like me, but given the assumption that one did so, it doesn’t seem more likely that it created me with (approximately) its own morality than that it created me with some different morality.
I don’t think we have a chance of doing so if we have a superintelligent creator who has taken steps to prevent us from doing so, no. (I also don’t think it likely that we have such a creator.)
Bayesians don’t believe in evidence silly goose, you know that. Anyway, User:cousin_it, you’re essentially right, though I think that LW would benefit less from developing updated arguments and more from reading Aquinas, at least in the counterfactual universe where LW knew how to read. Anyway. In the real world Less Wrong is hopeless. You’re not hopeless. As a decision theorist you’re trying to find God, so you have to believe in him in a sense, right? And if you’re not trying to find God you should probably stay the hell away from FAI projects. Just sayin’.
A really intelligent response, so I upvoted you, even though, as I said, it surprised me by telling me that, just as one example, tarot cards are Bad when I had not even considered the possibility, so I doubt this came from inside me.
Well you are obviously not able to predict the output of your own brain, that’s the whole point of the brain. If morality is in the brain and still too complex to understand, you would expect to encounter moral feelings that you had not anticipated.
Er, I thought it was overall pretty lame, e.g. the whole question-begging w.r.t. the ‘prior probability of omnibenevolent omnipowerful thingy’ thingy (nothing annoys me more than abuses of probability theory these days, especially abuses of algorithmic probability theory). Perhaps you are conceding too much in order to appear reasonable. Jesus wasn’t very polite.
By the way, in case you’re not overly familiar with the heuristics and biases literature, let me give you a hint: it sucks. At least the results that most folk around her cite have basically nothing to do with rationality. There’s some quite good stuff with tons of citations, e.g. Gigerenzer’s, but Eliezer barely mentioned it to Less Wrong (as fastandfrugal.com which he endorsed) and therefore as expected Less Wrong doesn’t know about it. (Same with interpretations of quantum mechanics, as Mitchell Porter often points out. I really hope that Eliezer is pulling some elaborate prank on humanity. Maybe he’s doing it unwittingly.)
Anyway the upshot is that when people tell you about ‘confirmation bias’ as if it existed in the sense they think it does then they probably don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and you should ignore them. At the very least don’t believe them until you’ve investigated the literature yourself. I did so and was shocked at how downright anti-informative the field is, and less shocked but still shocked at how incredibly useless statistics is (both Bayesianism as a theoretical normative measure and frequentism as a practical toolset for knowledge acquisition). The opposite happened with the parapsychology literature, i.e. low prior, high posterior. Let’s just say that it clearly did not confirm my preconceptions; lolol.
Lastly, towards the esoteric end: All roads lead to Rome, if you’ll pardon a Catholicism. If they don’t it’s not because the world is mad qua mad; it is because it is, alas, sinful. An easy way to get to hell is to fall into a fully-general-counterargument blackhole, or a literal blackhole maybe. Those things freak me out.
(P.S. My totally obnoxious arrogance is mostly just a passive aggressive way of trolling LW. I’m not actually a total douchebag IRL. /recursive-compulsive-self-justification)
I love how Less Wrong basically thinks that all evidence that doesn’t support its favored conclusion is bad because it just leads to confirmation bias. “The evidence is on your side, granted, but I have a fully general counterargument called ‘confirmation bias’ that explains why it’s not actually evidence!” Yeah, confirmation bias, one of the many claimed cognitive biases that arguably doesn’t actually exist. (Eliezer knew about the controversy, which is why his post is titled “Positive Bias”, which arguably also doesn’t exist, especially not in a cognitively relevant way.) Then they talk about Occam’s razor while completely failing to understand what algorithmic probability is actually saying. Hint: It definitely does not say that naturalistic mechanistic universes are a priori more probable! It’s like they’re trolling and I’m not supposed to feed them but they look sort of like a very hungry, incredibly stupid puppy.
Searching and skimming, the first link does not seem to actually say that confirmation bias does not exist. It says that it does not appear to be the cause of “overconfidence bias”—it seems to take no position on whether it exists otherwise.
Okay, yeah, I was taking a guess. There are other papers that talk about confirmation/positive bias specifically, a lot of in the vein of this kinda stuff. Maybe Kaj’s posts called ‘Heuristics and Biases Biases?’ from here on LW references some relevant papers too. Sorry, I have limited cognitive resources at the moment, I’m mostly trying to point in the general direction of the relevant literature because there’s quite a lot of it.
So I think you’re quite right in that “supernatural” and “natural” are sets that contain possible universes of very different complexity and that those two adjectives are not obviously relevant to the complexity of the universes they describe. I support tabooing those terms. But if you compare two universes, one of which is described most simply by the wave function and an initial state, and another which is described by the wave function, an initial state and another section of code describing the psychic powers of certain agents the latter universe is a priori more unlikely (bracketing for the moment the simulation issue), Obviously if psi phenomenon can be incorporated into the physical model without adding additional lines of code that’s another matter entirely.
Returning to the simulation issue I take your position to be that there are conceivable “meta-physics” (meant literally; not necessarily referring to the branch of philosophy) which can make local complexities more common? Is that a fair restatement? I have a suspicion that this is not possibly without paying the complexity back at the other end, though I’m not sure.
Anyway the upshot is that when people tell you about ‘confirmation bias’ as if it existed in the sense they think it does then they probably don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and you should ignore them.
...
I love how Less Wrong basically thinks that all evidence that doesn’t support its favored conclusion is bad because it just leads to confirmation bias. “The evidence is on your side, granted, but I have a fully general counterargument called ‘confirmation bias’ that explains why it’s not actually evidence!” Yeah, confirmation bias, one of the many claimed cognitive biases that arguably doesn’t actually exist.
What was said that’s a synonym for or otherwise invoked the confirmation bias?
It’s mentioned a few times in this thread re AspiringKnitter’s evidence for Christianity. I’m too lazy to link to them, especially as it’d be so easy to get the answer to your question with control+f “confirmation” that I’m not sure I interpreted it correctly?
Just to echo the others that brought this up, I applaud your courage; few people have the guts to jump into the lions’ den, as it were. That said, I’m going to play the part of the lion (*) on this topic.
I suddenly became capable of feeling two new sensations, neither of which I’d felt before and neither of which, so far as I know, has words in English to describe it.
How do you know that these sensations come from a supernatural entity, and not from your own brain ? I know that if I started experiencing odd physical sensations, no matter how pleasant, this would be my first hypothesis (especially since, in my personal case, the risk of stroke is higher than average). In fact, if I experienced anything that radically contradicted my understanding of the world, I’d probably consider the following explanations, in order of decreasing likelihood:
I am experiencing some well-known cognitive bias.
My brain is functioning abnormally and thus I am experiencing hallucinations.
Someone is playing a prank on me.
Shadowy human agencies are testing a new chemical/biological/emissive device on me.
A powerful (yet entirely material) alien is inducing these sensations, for some reason.
A trickster spirit (such as a Kami, or the Coyote, etc.) is doing the same by supernatural means.
A localized god is to blame (Athena, Kali, the Earth Mother, etc.)
An omniscient, omnipotent, and generally all-everything entity is responsible.
This list is not exhaustive, obviously, it’s just some stuff I came up with off the top of my head. Each next bullet point is less probable than the one before it, and thus I’d have to reject pretty much every other explanation before arriving at “the Christian God exists”.
Is either of those well-known? What about the pattern with which they’re felt? Sound like anything you know? Me neither.
My brain is functioning abnormally and thus I am experiencing hallucinations.
That don’t have any other effect? That remain stable for years? With no other sign of mental illness? Besides, if I set out by assuming that I can’t tell anything because I’m crazy anyway, what good does that do me? It doesn’t tell me what to predict. It doesn’t tell me what to do. All it tells me is “expect nothing and believe nothing”. If I assume it’s just these hallucinations and everything else is normal, then I run into “my brain is functioning abnormally and I am experiencing hallucinations that tell me Christian doctrine is true even when I don’t know the doctrine in question”, which is the original problem you’re trying to explain.
A trickster spirit (such as a Kami, or the Coyote, etc.) is doing the same by supernatural means.
And instead of messing with me like a real trickster, it convinces me to worship something other than it and in so doing increases my quality of life?
However, there’s a reason I put “cognitive bias” as the first item on my list: I believe that it is overwhelmingly more likely than any alternatives. Thus, it would take a significant amount of evidence to convince me that I’m not laboring under such a bias, even if the bias does not yet have a catchy name.
That don’t have any other effect? That remain stable for years? With no other sign of mental illness?
AFAIK some brain cancers can present this way. In any case, if I started experiencing unusual physical symptoms all of a sudden, I’d consult a medical professional. Then I’d write down the results of his tests, and consult a different medical professional, just in case. Better safe than sorry.
And instead of messing with me like a real trickster, it convinces me to worship something other than it and in so doing increases my quality of life?
Trickster spirits (especially Tanuki or Kitsune) rarely demand worship; messing with people is enough for them. Some such spirits are more or less benign; the Tanuki and Raven both would probably be on board with the idea of tricking a human into improving his or her life.
That said, you skipped over human agents and aliens, both of which are IMO overwhelmingly more likely to exist than spirits (though that doesn’t make them likely to exist in absolute terms).
Well, as best I can tell my maintainer didn’t install the religion patch, so all I’m working with is the testaments of others; but I have seen quite a variety of such testaments. Buddhism and Hinduism have a typology of religious experience much more complex than anything I’ve seen systematically laid down in mainline Christianity; it’s usually expressed in terms unique to the Dharmic religions, but vipassanā for example certainly seems to qualify as an experiential pointer to Buddhist ontology.
If you’d prefer Western traditions, a phrase I’ve heard kicked around in the neopagan, reconstructionist, and ceremonial magic communities is “unsubstantiated personal gnosis”. While that’s a rather flippant way of putting it, it also seems to point to something similar to your experiences.
Careful, you may end up like Draco in HPMoR chapter 23, without a way to gom jabbar the guilty parties (sorry about the formatting):
“You should have warned me,” Draco said. His voice rose. “You should have warned me!”
“I… I did… every time I told you about the power, I told you about the price. I said, you have to admit you’re wrong. I said this would be the hardest path for you. That this was the sacrifice anyone had to make to become a scientist. I said, what if the experiment says one thing and your family and friends say another—”
“You call that a warning?” Draco was screaming now. “You call that a warning? When we’re doing a ritual that calls for a permanent sacrifice?”
“I… I...” The boy on the floor swallowed. “I guess maybe it wasn’t clear. I’m sorry. But that which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”
Nah, false beliefs are worthless. That which is true is already so; owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. If I turned out to actually be wrong—well, I have experience being wrong about religion. I’d probably react just like I did before.
It sounded like she was already coming down on the side of the good being good because it is commanded by God when she said, “an innate morality that seems, possibly, somewhat arbitrary.”
So maybe the dilemma is not such a problem for her.
I can understand your hesitation about telling that story. Thanks for sharing it.
Some questions, if you feel like answering them:
Can you give me some examples of things you hadn’t known Christian doctrine considered Bad before you sensed them as A?
If you were advising someone who lacks the ability to sense Good and Bad directly on how to have accurate beliefs about what’s Good and Bad, what advice would you give? (It seems to follow from what you’ve said elsewhere that simply telling them to believe Christianity isn’t sufficient, since lots of people sincerely believe they are following the directive to “believe Christianity” and yet end up believing Bad things. It seems something similar applies to “believe the New Testament”. Or does it?)
If you woke up tomorrow and you experienced sensation A in situations that were consistent with Christianity being true, and experienced sensation B in situations that were consistent with Islam being true, what would you conclude about the world based on those experiences?
** EDIT: My original comment got A and B reversed. Fixed.
I think that should probably be AspiringKnitter’s call. (I don’t think you’re pushing too hard, given the general norms of this community, but I’m not sure of what our norms concerning religious discussions are.)
Let’s try that! I got a Bad signal on the Koran and a website explaining the precepts of Wicca, but I knew what both of those were. I would be up for trying a test where you give me quotes from the Christian Bible (warning: I might recognize them; if so, I’ll tell you, but for what it’s worth I’ve only read part of Ezekiel, but might recognize the story anyway… I’ve read a lot of the Bible, actually), other holy books and neutral sources like novels (though I might have read those, too; I’ll tell you if I recognize them), without telling me where they’re from. If it’s too difficult to find Biblical quotes, other Christian writings might serve, as could similar writings from other religions. I should declare up front that I know next to nothing about Hinduism but once got a weak Good reading from what someone said about it. Also, I would prefer longer quotes; the feelings build up from unnoticeable, rather than hitting full-force instantly. If they could be at least as long as a chapter of the Bible, that would be good.
That is, if you’re actually proposing that we test this. If you didn’t really want to, sorry. It just seems cool.
The preparatory prayer is made according to custom.
The first prelude will be a certain historical consideration of ___ on the one part, and __ on the other, each of whom is calling all men to him, to be gathered together under his standard.
The second is, for the construction of the place, that there be represented to us a most extensive plain around Jerusalem, in which ___ stands as the Chief-General of all good people. Again, another plain in the country of Babylon, where ___ presents himself as the captain of the wicked and [God’s] enemies.
The third, for asking grace, will be this, that we ask to explore and see through the deceits- of the evil captain, invoking at the same time the Divine help in order to avoid them ; and to know, and by grace be able to imitate, the sincere ways of the true and most excellent General, ___ .
The first point is, to imagine before my eyes, in the Babylonian plain, the captain of the wicked, sitting in a chair of fire and smoke, horrible in figure, and terrible in countenance.
The second, to consider how, having as sembled a countless number of demons, he disperses them through the whole world in order to do mischief; no cities or places, no kinds of persons, being left free.
The third, to consider what kind of address he makes to his servants, whom he stirs up to seize, and secure in snares and chains, and so draw men (as commonly happens) to the desire of riches, whence afterwards they may the more easily be forced down into the ambition of worldly honour, and thence into the abyss of pride.
Thus, then, there are three chief degrees of temptation, founded in riches, honours, and pride; from which three to all other kinds of vices the downward course is headlong.
If I had more of the quote, it would be easier. I get a weak Bad feeling, but while the textual cues suggest it probably comes from either the Talmud or the Koran, and while I think it is, I’m not getting a strong feeling on this quote, so this makes me worry that I could be confused by my guess as to where it comes from.
But I’m going to stick my neck out anyway; I feel like it’s Bad.
If I had more of the quote, it would be easier. I get a weak Bad feeling, but while the textual cues suggest it probably comes from either the Talmud or the Koran, and while I think it is, I’m not getting a strong feeling on this quote, so this makes me worry that I could be confused by my guess as to where it comes from. But I’m going to stick my neck out anyway; I feel like it’s Bad.
What do you think of this; it’s a little less obscure:
Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if [God] should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock. Were it not that so is the sovereign pleasure of [God], the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the sun don’t willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and [the evil one]; the earth don’t willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air don’t willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service of [God]‘s enemies. [God]‘s creatures are good, and were made for men to serve [God] with, and don’t willingly subserve to any other purpose, and groan when they are abused to purposes so directly contrary to their nature and end. And the world would spew you out, were it not for the sovereign hand of him who hath subjected it in hope. There are the black clouds of [God]’s wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm, and big with thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of [God] it would immediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of [God] for the present stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury, and your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like the chaff of the summer threshing floor.
I recognized it by the first sentence, but then I have read it several times. (For those of you that haven’t heard of it, it is probably the most famous American sermon, delivered in 1741.)
… the mysterious (tablet)…is surrounded by an innumerable company of angels; these angels are of all kinds, — some brilliant and flashing , down to . The light comes and goes on the tablet; and now it is steady...
And now there comes an Angel, to hide the tablet with his mighty wing. This Angel has all the colours mingled in his dress; his head is proud and beautiful; his headdress is of silver and red and blue and gold and black, like cascades of water, and in his left hand he has a pan-pipe of the seven holy metals, upon which he plays. I cannot tell you how wonderful the music is, but it is so wonderful that one only lives in one’s ears; one cannot see anything any more.
Now he stops playing and moves with his finger in the air. His finger leaves a trail of fire of every colour, so that the whole Aire is become like a web of mingled lights. But through it all drops dew.
(I can’t describe these things at all. Dew doesn’t represent what I mean in the least. For instance, these drops of dew are enormous globes, shining like the full moon, only perfectly transparent, as well as perfectly luminous.)
…
All this while the dewdrops have turned into cascades of gold finer than the eyelashes of a little child. And though the extent of the Aethyr is so enormous, one perceives each hair separately, as well as the whole thing at once. And now there is a mighty concourse of angels rushing toward me from every side, and they melt upon the surface of the egg in which I am standing __, so that the surface of the egg is all one dazzling blaze of liquid light.
Now I move up against the tablet, — I cannot tell you with what rapture. And all the names of __, that are not known even to the angels, clothe me about. All the seven senses are transmuted into one sense, and that sense is dissolved in itself …
You had a Bad feeling about two Christian quotes that mentioned Hell or demons/hellfire. You also got a Good feeling about a quote from Nietzsche that didn’t mention Hell. I don’t know the context of your reactions to the Tarot and Wicca, but obviously people have linked those both to Hell. (See also Horned God, “Devil” trump.) So I wanted to get your reaction to a passage with no mention of Hell from an indeterminate religion, in case that sufficed to make it seem Good.
The author designed a famous Tarot deck, and inspired a big chunk (at minimum) of Wicca.
I hadn’t considered that hypothesis. I’d upvote for the novel theory, but now that you’ve told me you’ll never be able to trust further reactions that could confirm or deny it, which seems like it’s worth a downvote, so not voting your post up or down. That said, I think this fails to explain having a Bad reaction to this page and the entire site it’s on, despite thinking before reading it that Wicca was foofy nonsense and completely not expecting to find evil of that magnitude (a really, really strong feeling—none of the quotes you guys have asked me about have been even a quarter that bad). It wasn’t slow, either; unlike most other things, it was almost immediately obvious. (The fact that this has applied to everything else I’ve ever read about Wicca since—at least, everything written by Wiccans about their own religion—could have to do with expectation, so I can see where you wouldn’t regard subsequent reactions as evidence… but the first one, at least, caught me totally off-guard.)
I know who Crowley is. (It was his tarot deck that someone gave me as a gift—and I was almost happy about it, because I’d actually been intending to research tarot because it seemed cool and I meant to use the information for a story I was writing. But then I felt like, you know, Bad, so I didn’t end up using it.) That’s why I was surprised not to have a bad feeling about his writings.
Man is a rope tied between beast and [superior man] - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what
is lovable in man is that he is an overture and a going under.
I love those that know not how to live except by going under, for
they are those who cross over.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great reverers,
and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for
going under and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the
earth, that the earth may some day become the [superior man’s].
I love him who lives to know, and wants to know so
that the [superior man] may live some day. Thus he wants to go under.
I love him who works and invents to build a house for the [superior man]
and to prepare earth, animal, and plant for him: for thus he wants to go under.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to go under, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who does not hold back one drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides over the bridge as spirit.
I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and catastrophe: for his virtue’s sake he wants to live on and to live no longer.
I love him who does not want to have too many virtues. One virtue is more virtue than two, because it is more of a noose on which his catastrophe may hang.
I love him whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and returns none: for he always gives away, and does not want to preserve himself.
I love him who is abashed when the dice fall to make his fortune, and
who asks: “Am I a crooked gambler?” For he wants to perish.
I love him who casts golden words before his deed, and always does more than he promises: for he wants to go under.
I love him who justifies future and redeems past generations: for he wants to perish of the present.
I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must perish of the wrath of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in being wounded, and who can perish of a small experience: thus he gladly goes over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things spell his going under.
I love him who has a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the entrails of his heart, but his heart causes him to go under.
I love all who are as heavy drops, falling one by one out of the dark cloud that hangs over men: they herald the advent of lightning, and, as heralds, they perish.
Behold, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called [superior man].
I get a moderate Good reading (?!) and I’m confused to get it because the morality the person is espousing seems wrong. I’m guessing this comes from someone’s writings about their religion, possibly an Eastern religion?
I get a moderate Good reading (?!) and I’m confused to get it because the morality the person is espousing seems wrong. I’m guessing this comes from someone’s writings about their religion, possibly an Eastern religion?
Walter Kaufman (Nietzsche’s translator here) prefers overman as the best translation of ubermensch.
ETA: This is some interesting commentary on the work
I’m surprised. I’d heard Nietzsche was not a nice person, but had also heard good things about him… huh. I’ll have to read his work, now. I wonder if the library has some.
Niezsche’s sister was an anti-semite and a German nationalist. After Nietzsche’s death, she edited his works into something that became an intellectual foundation for Nazism. Thus, he got a terrible reputation in the English speaking world.
It’s tolerable clear from a reading of his unabridged works that Nietzsche would have hated Nazism. But he would not have identified himself as Christian (at least as measured by a typical American today). He went mad before he died, and the apocryphal tale is that the last thing he did before being institutionalize was to see a horse being beaten on the street and moving to protect it.
To see his moral thought, you could read Thus Spake Zarathustra. To see why he isn’t exactly Christian, you can look at The Geneology of Morals. Actually, you might also like Kierkegaard because he expresses somewhat similar thoughts, but within a Christian framework.
To really see why he isn’t Christian, read The Antichrist.
The Christian conception of God—God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth… God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God—the formula for every slander against “this world,” for every lie about the “beyond”! God—the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy!
As with what he wrote in Genealogy of Morals, it is unclear how tongue-in-cheek/intentional provocative Nietzsche is being. I’m honestly not sure whether Nietzsche thought the “master morality” was better or worse than the “slave morality.”
The sense I get—but note that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve read any substantial amount of Nietzsche—is that he treats master morality as more honest, and perhaps what we could call psychologically healthier, than slave morality, but does not advocate that the former be adopted over the latter by people living now; the transition between the two is usually explained in terms of historical changes. The morality embodied by his superior man is neither, or a synthesis of the two, and while he says a good deal about what it’s not I don’t have a clear picture of many positive traits attached to it.
The morality embodied by his superior man is neither, or a synthesis of the two, and while he says a good deal about what it’s not I don’t have a clear picture of many positive traits attached to it.
That’s because the superman, by definition, invents his own morality. If you read a book telling you the positive content of morality and implement it because the eminent philosopher says so, you ain’t superman.
I wouldn’t call him a fully sane person, especially in his later work (he suffered in later life from mental problems most often attributed to neurosyphilis, and it shows), but he has a much worse reputation than I think he really deserves. I’d recommend Genealogy of Morals and The Gay Science; they’re both laid out a bit more clearly than the works he’s most famous for, which tend to be heavily aphoristic and a little scattershot.
It’s easy to find an equally forceful bit by Nietzsche that’s not been quoted to death, really. Had AK recognized it, you would’ve botched a perfectly good test.
Fairly read as a whole and in the context of the trial, the instructions required the jury to find that Chiarella obtained his trading advantage by misappropriating the property of his employer’s customers. The jury was charged that,
“[i]n simple terms, the charge is that Chiarella wrongfully took advantage of information he acquired in the course of his confidential position at Pandick Press and secretly used that information when he knew other people trading in the securities market did not have access to the same information that he had at a time when he knew that that information was material to the value of the stock.”
Record 677 (emphasis added). The language parallels that in the indictment, and the jury had that indictment during its deliberations; it charged that Chiarella had traded “without disclosing the material non-public information he had obtained in connection with his employment.” It is underscored by the clarity which the prosecutor exhibited in his opening statement to the jury. No juror could possibly have failed to understand what the case was about after the prosecutor said:
“In sum, what the indictment charges is that Chiarella misused material nonpublic information for personal gain and that he took unfair advantage of his position of trust with the full knowledge that it was wrong to do so. That is what the case is about. It is that simple.”
Id. at 46. Moreover, experienced defense counsel took no exception and uttered no complaint that the instructions were inadequate in this regard. [Therefore, the conviction is due to be affirmed].
I get no reading here. My guess is that this is some sort of legal document, in which case I’m not really surprised to get no reading. Is that correct?
Yes, it is a legal document. Specifically a dissent from the reversal of a criminal conviction. In particular, I think the quoted text is an incredibly immoral and wrong-headed understanding of American criminal law. Which makes it particularly depressing that the writer was Chief Justice when he wrote it
Yes, where names need to be changed. [God] will be sufficient to confuse me as to whether it’s “the LORD” or “Allah” in the original source material. There might be a problem with substance in very different holy books where I might be able to guess the religion just by what they’re saying (like if they talk about reincarnation or castes, I’ll know they’re Hindu or Buddhist). I hope anyone finding quotes will avoid those, of course.
This is a bit off-topic, but, out of curiosity, is there anything in particular that you find objectionable about Wicca on a purely analytical level ? I’m not saying that you must have such a reason, I’m just curious.
Just in the interests of pure disclosure, the reason I ask is because I found Wicca to be the least harmful religion among all the religions I’d personally encountered. I realize that, coming from an atheist, this doesn’t mean much, of course...
I’m actually not entirely sure what you mean by “incorrect”, and how it differs from “sinful”. As an atheist, I would say that Wicca is “incorrect” in the same way that every other religion is incorrect, but presumably you’d disagree, since you’re religious.
Some Christians would say that Wicca is both “incorrect” and “sinful” because its followers pray to the wrong gods, since a). YHVH/Jesus is the only God who exists, thus worshiping other (nonexistent) gods is incorrect, and b). he had expressly commanded his followers to worship him alone, and disobeying God is sinful. In this case, though, the “sinful” part seems a bit redundant (since Wiccans would presumably worship Jesus if they were convinced that he existed and their own gods did not). But perhaps you meant something else ?
I mean incorrect in that they believe things that are wrong, yes; they believe in, for instance, a goddess who doesn’t really exist. And sinful because witchcraft is forbidden.
Wouldn’t this imply that witchcraft is effective, though ? Otherwise it wouldn’t be forbidden; after all, God never said (AFAIK), “you shouldn’t pretend to cast spells even though they don’t really work”, nor did he forbid a bunch of other stuff that is merely silly and a waste of time. But if witchcraft is effective, it would imply that it’s more or less “correct”, which is why I was originally confused about what you meant.
FWIW, I feel compelled to point out that some Wiccans believe in multiple gods or none at all, even though this is off-topic—since I can practically hear my Wiccan acquaintances yelling at me in the back of my head… metaphorically speaking, that is.
Wouldn’t this imply that witchcraft is effective, though ?
Yes.
Ok, but in that case, isn’t witchcraft at least partially “correct” ? Otherwise, how can they cast all those spells and make them actually work (assuming, that is, that their spells actually do work) ?
Ah, right, so you believe that the entities that Wiccans worship do in some way exist, but that they are actually demons, not benign gods.
I should probably point out at this point that Wiccans (well, at least those whom I’d met), consider this point of view utterly misguided and incredibly offensive. No one likes to be called a “demon-worshiper”, especially when one is generally a nice person whose main tenet in life is a version of “do no harm”. You probably meant no disrespect, but flat-out calling a whole group of people “demon-worshipers” tends to inflame passions rather quickly, and not in a good way.
I should probably point out at this point that Wiccans (well, at least those whom I’d met), consider this point of view utterly misguided and incredibly offensive.
That’s a bizarre thing to say. Is their offense evidence that I’m wrong? I don’t think so; I’d expect it whether or not they worship demons. Or should I believe something falsely because the truth is offensive? That would go against my values—and, dare I say it, the suggestion is offensive. ;) Or do you want me to lie so I’ll sound less offensive? That risks harm to me (it’s forbidden by the New Testament) and to them (if no one ever tells them the truth, they can’t learn), as well as not being any fun.
No one likes to be called a “demon-worshiper”,
What is true is already so,
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
especially when one is generally a nice person whose main tenet in life is a version of “do no harm”.
Nice people like that deserve truth, not lies, especially when eternity is at stake.
flat-out calling a whole group of people “demon-worshipers” tends to inflame passions rather quickly,
So does calling people Cthulhu-worshipers. But when you read that article, you agreed that it was apt, right? Because you think it’s true. You guys sure seem quick to tell me that my beliefs are offensive, but if I said the same to you, you’d understand why that’s beside the point. If Wiccans worship demons, I desire to believe that Wiccans worship demons; if Wiccans don’t worship demons, I desire to believe that Wiccans don’t worship demons. Sure, it’s offensive and un-PC. If you want me to stop believing it, tell me why you think it’s wrong.
I like your post (and totally agree with the first paragraph), but have some concerns that are a little different from Bugmaster’s.
What’s the exact difference between a god and a demon? Suppose Wicca is run by a supernatural being (let’s call her Astarte) who asks her followers to follow commendable moral rules, grants their petitions when expressed in the ritualistic form of spells, and insists she will reward the righteous and punishes the wicked. You worship a different supernatural being who also asks His followers to follow commendable moral rules, grants their petitions when expressed in the ritualistic form of prayer, and insists He will reward the righteous and punish the wicked. If both Jehovah and Astarte exist and act similarly, why name one “a god” and the other “a demon”? Really, the only asymmetry seems to be that Jehovah tries to inflict eternal torture on people who prefer Astarte, where Astarte has made no such threats among people who prefer Jehovah, which is honestly advantage Astarte. So why not just say “Of all the supernatural beings out there, some people prefer this one and other people prefer that one”?
I mean, one obvious answer is certainly to list the ways Jehovah is superior to Astarte—the one created the Universe, the other merely lives in it; the one is all-powerful, the other merely has some magic; the one is wise and compassionate, the other evil and twisted. But all of these are Jehovah’s assertions. One imagines Astarte makes different assertions to her followers. The question is whose claims to believe.
Jehovah has a record of making claims which seem to contradict the evidence from other sources—the seven-day creation story, for example. And He has a history of doing things which, when assessed independently of their divine origin, we would consider immoral—the Massacre of the Firstborn in Exodus, or sanctioning the rape, enslavement, infanticide, and genocide of the Canaanites. So it doesn’t seem obvious at all that we should trust His word over Astarte’s, especially since you seem to think that Astarte’s main testable claim—that she does magic for her followers—is true.
Now, you’ve already said that you believe in Christianity because of direct personal revelation—a sense of serenity and rightness when you hear its doctrines, and a sense of repulsion from competing religions, and that this worked even when you didn’t know what religion you were encountering and so could not bias the result. I upvoted you when you first posted this because I agree that such feelings could provide some support for religious belief. But that was before you said you believed in competing supernatural beings. Surely you realize how difficult a situation that puts you in?
Giving someone a weak feeling of serenity or repulsion is, as miracles go, not a very flashy one. One imagines it would take only simple magic, and should be well within the repertoire of even a minor demon or spirit. And you agree that Astarte performs minor miracles of the same caliber all the time to try to convince her own worshippers. So all that your feelings indicate is that some supernatural being is trying to push you toward Christianity. If you already believe that there are multiple factions of supernatural beings, some of whom push true religions and others of whom push false ones, then noticing that some supernatural being is trying to push you toward Christianity provides zero extra evidence that Christianity is true.
Why should you trust the supernatural beings who have taken an interest in your case, as opposed to the supernatural beings apparently from a different faction who caused the seemingly miraculous revelations in this person and this person’s lives?
Since you use the names Jehovah and Astarte, I’ll follow suit, though they’re not the names I prefer.
The difference would be that if worship of Jehovah gets you eternal life in heaven, and worship of Astarte gets you eternal torture and damnation, then you should worship Jehovah and not Astarte. Also, if Astarte knows this, but pretends otherwise, then Astarte’s a liar.
If you already believe that there are multiple factions of supernatural beings, some of whom push true religions and others of whom push false ones, then noticing that some supernatural being is trying to push you toward Christianity provides zero extra evidence that Christianity is true.
Not quite. I only believe in “multiple factions of supernatural beings” (actually only two) because it’s implied by Christianity being true. It’s not a prior belief. If Christianity is false, one or two or fifteen or zero omnipotent or slightly-powerful or once-human or monstrous gods could exist, but if Christianity is false I’d default to atheism, since if my evidence for Christianity proved false (say, I hallucinated it all because of some undiagnosed mental illness that doesn’t resemble any currently-known mental illness and only causes that one symptom) without my gaining additional evidence for some other religion or non-atheist cosmology, I’d have no evidence for anything spiritual. Or do I misunderstand? I’m confused.
Why should you trust the supernatural beings who have taken an interest in your case, as opposed to the supernatural beings apparently from a different faction who caused the seemingly miraculous revelations in this person and this person’s lives?
Being, singular, first of all.
I already know myself, what kind of a person I am. I know how rational I am. I know how non-crazy I am. I know exactly the extent to which I’ve considered illness affecting my thoughts as a possible explanation.
I know I’m not lying.
The first person became an apostate, something I’ve never done, and is still confused years later. The second person records only the initial conversion, while I know how it’s played out in my own life for several years.
The second person is irrationally turned off by even the mere appearance of Catholicism and Christianity in general because of terrible experiences with Catholics.
I discount all miracle stories from people I don’t know, including Christian and Jewish miracle stories, which could at least plausibly be true. I discount them ALL when I don’t know the person. In fact, that means MOST of the stories I hear and consider unlikely (without passing judgment when I have so little info) are stories that, if true, essentially imply Christianity, while others would provide evidence for it.
And knowing how my life has gone, I know how I’ve changed as a person since accepting Jesus, or Jehovah if that’s the word you prefer. They don’t mention drastic changes to their whole personalities to the point of near-unrecognizability even to themselves. In brief: I was unbelievably awful. I was cruel, hateful, spiteful, vengeful and not a nice person. I was actively hurtful toward everyone, including immediate family. After finding Jesus, I slowly became a less horrible person, until I got to where I am now. Self-evaluation may be somewhat unreliable, but I think the lack of any physical violence recently is a good sign. Also, rather than escalating arguments as far as possible, when I realize I’ve lashed out, I deliberately make an effort not to fall prey to consistency bias and defend my actions, but to stop and apologize and calm down. That’s something I would not have done—would not have WANTED to do, would not have thought was a good idea, before.
And you agree that Astarte performs minor miracles of the same caliber all the time to try to convince her own worshippers.
I don’t know (I only guess) what Astarte does to xyr worshipers. I’m conjecturing; I’ve never prayed to xem, nor have I ever been a Wiccan or any other type of non-Christian religion. But I think I ADBOC this statement; if said by me, it would have sounded more like “Satan makes xyrself look very appealing”.
(I’m used to a masculine form for this being. You’re using a feminine form. Rather than argue, I’ve simply shifted my pronoun usage to an accurate—possibly more accurate—and less loaded set of pronouns.)
Also, my experience suggests that if something is good or evil, and you’re open to the knowledge, you’ll see through any lies or illusions with time. It might be a lot of time—I’ll confess I recently got suckered into something for, I think, a couple of years, when I really ought to have known better much sooner, and no, I don’t want to talk about it—but to miss it forever requires deluding yourself.
(Not, as we all know, that self-delusion is particularly rare...)
So all that your feelings indicate is that some supernatural being is trying to push you toward Christianity.
That someone is trying to convince me to be a Christian or that I perceive the nature of things using an extra sense.
Giving someone a weak feeling of serenity or repulsion is, as miracles go, not a very flashy one.
Strength varies. Around the time I got to the fourth Surah of the Koran, it was much flashier than anything I’ve seen since, including everything previously described (on the negative side) at incredible strength plus an olfactory hallucination. And the result of, I think, two days straight of Bible study and prayer at all times constantly… well, that was more than a weak feeling of serenity. But on its own it’d be pretty weak evidence, because I was only devoting so much time to prayer because my state of mind was so volatile and my thoughts and feelings were unreliable. It’s only repetitions of that effect that let me conclude that it means what I’ve already listed, after controlling for other possibilities that are personal so I don’t want to talk about it. Those are rare extremes, though; normally it’s not as flashy as those.
you seem to think that Astarte’s main testable claim—that she does magic for her followers—is true.
I consider it way likelier than you do, anyway. I’m only around fiftyish percent confidence here. But that’s only one aspect of it. Their religion also claims to cause changes in its followers along the lines of “more in tune with the Divine” or something, right? So if there are any overlapping claims about morality, that would also be testable—NOT absolute morality of the followers, but change in morality on mutually-believed-in traits, measuring before and after conversion, then a year on, then a few years on, then several years on. Of course, I’m not sure how you’ll ever get the truth about how moral people are when they think no one’s watching...
Sorry—I used “Astarte” and the female pronoun because the Wiccans claim to worship a Goddess, and Astarte was the first female demon I could think of. If we’re going to go gender-neutral, I recommend “eir”, just because I think it’s the most common gender neutral pronoun on this site and there are advantages to standardizing this sort of thing.
The difference would be that if worship of Jehovah gets you eternal life in heaven, and worship of Astarte gets you eternal torture and damnation, then you should worship Jehovah and not Astarte.
Well, okay, but this seems to be an argument from force, sort of “Jehovah is a god and Astarte a demon because if I say anything else, Jehovah will torture me”. It seems to have the same form as “Stalin is not a tyrant, because if I call Stalin a tyrant, he will kill me, and I don’t want that!”
Not quite. I only believe in “multiple factions of supernatural beings” (actually only two) because it’s implied by Christianity being true.
It sounds like you’re saying the causal history of your belief should affect the probability of it being true.
Suppose before you had any mystical experience, you had non-zero probabilities X of atheism, Y of Christianity (in which God promotes Christianity and demons promote non-Christian religions like Wicca), and Z of any non-Christian religion (in which God promotes that religion and demons promote Christianity).
Then you experience an event which you interpret as evidence for a supernatural being promoting Christianity. This should raise the probability of Y and Z an equal amount, since both theories seem to equally predict this would happen.
You could still end up a Christian if you started off with a higher probability Y than Z, but it sounds like you weren’t especially interested in Christianity before your mystical experience, and the prior for Z is higher than Y since there are so many more non-Christian than Christian religions.
Being, singular, first of all...
I understand you as having two categories of objections: first, objections that the specific people in the Islamic conversion stories are untrustworthy or their stories uninteresting (3,4,6). Second, that you find mystical experiences by other people inherently hard to believe but you believe your own because you are a normal sane person (1,2,5).
The first category of objections apply only to those specific people’s stories. That’s fair enough since those were the ones I presented, but they were the ones I presented because they were the first few good ones I found in the vast vast vast vast VAST Islamic conversion story literature. I assume that if you were to list your criteria for believability, we could eventually find some Muslim who experienced a seemingly miraculous conversion who fit all of those criteria (including changing asa person) - if it’s important to you to test this, we can try.
The second category of objections is more interesting. Different studies show somewhere from a third to half of Americans having mystical experiences, including about a third of non-religious people who have less incentive to lie. Five percent of people experience them “regularly”. Even granted that some of these people are lying and other people categorize “I felt really good” as a mystical experience, I don’t think denying that these occur is really an option.
The typical view that people need to be crazy, or on the brink of death, or uneducated, or something other than a normal middle class college-educated WASP adult in order to have mystical experiences also breaks down before the evidence. According to Greeley 1975 and Hay and Morisy 1976, well-educated upper class people are more likely to have mystical experiences, and Hay and Morisy 1978 found that people with mystical experiences are more likely to be mentally well-balanced.
Since these experiences occur with equal frequency among people of all religion and even atheists, I continue to think this supports either the “natural mental process” idea or the “different factions of demons” idea—you can probably guess which one I prefer :)
Also, my experience suggests that if something is good or evil, and you’re open to the knowledge, you’ll see through any lies or illusions with time.
There are 1.57 billion Muslims and 2.2 billion Christians in the world. Barring something very New-Agey going on, at least one of those groups believes an evil lie. The number of Muslims who convert to Christianity at some point in their lives, or vice versa, is only a tiny fraction of a percent. So either only a tiny fraction of a percent of people are open to the knowledge—so tiny that you could not reasonably expect yourself to be among them—or your experience has just been empirically disproven.
(PS: You’re in a lot of conversations at once—let me know if you want me to drop this discussion, or postpone it for later)
Speaking of mystical experiences, my religion tutor at the university (an amazing woman, Christian but pretty rational and liberal) had one, as she told us, in transport one day, and that’s when she converted, despite growing up at an atheistic middle-class Soviet family.
Oh, and the closest thing I ever had to one was when I tried sensory deprivation + dissociatives (getting high on cough syrup, then submersing myself in a warm bath with lights out and ears plugged; had a timer set to 40 minutes and a thin ray of light falling where I could see it by turning my head as precaution against, y’know, losing myself). That experiment was both euphoric and interesting, but I wouldn’t really want to repeat it. I experienced blissful ego death and a feeling of the universe spinning round and round in cycles, around where I would be, but where now was nothing. It’s hard to describe.
And then, well, I saw the tiny, shining shape of Rei Ayanami. She was standing in her white plugsuit amidst the blasted ruins on a dead alien world, and I got the feeling that she was there to restore it to life. She didn’t look at me, but I knew she knew I saw her. Then it was over.
Fret not, I didn’t really make any more bullshit out of that, but it’s certainly an awesome moment to remember.
Second, that you find mystical experiences by other people inherently hard to believe but you believe your own because you are a normal sane person (1,2,5).
Unless I know them already. Once I already know people for honest, normal, sane people (“normal” isn’t actually required and I object to the typicalist language), their miracle stories have the same weight as my own. Also, miracles of more empirically-verifiable sorts are believable when vetted by snopes.com.
If we’re going to go gender-neutral, I recommend “eir”, just because I think it’s the most common gender neutral pronoun on this site and there are advantages to standardizing this sort of thing.
Xe is poetic and awesome. I’m hoping it’ll become standard English. To that end, I use it often.
(including changing as a person)
I read your first link and I’m very surprised because I didn’t expect something like that. It would be interesting to talk to that person about this.
So either only a tiny fraction of a percent of people are open to the knowledge—so tiny that you could not reasonably expect yourself to be among them -
Is that surprising? First of all, I know that I already converted to Christianity, rather than just having assumed it always, so I’m already more likely to be open to new facts. And second, I thought it was common knowledge around these parts that most people are really, really bad at finding the truth. How many people know Bayes? How many know what confirmation bias is? Anchoring? The Litany of Tarski? Don’t people on this site rail against how low the sanity waterline is? I mean, you don’t disagree that I’m more rational than most Christians and Muslims, right?
Different studies show somewhere from a third to half of Americans having mystical experiences, including about a third of non-religious people who have less incentive to lie. Five percent of people experience them “regularly”.
Do they do this by using tricks like Multiheaded described? Or by using mystical plants or meditation? (I know there are Christians who think repeating a certain prayer as a mantra and meditating on it for a long time is supposed to work… and isn’t there, or wasn’t there, some Islamic sect where people try to find God by spinning around?) If so, that really doesn’t count. Is there another study where that question was asked? Because if you’re asserting that mystical experiences can be artificially induced by such means in most if not all people, then we’re in agreement.
Well, okay, but this seems to be an argument from force, sort of “Jehovah is a god and Astarte a demon because if I say anything else, Jehovah will torture me”. It seems to have the same form as “Stalin is not a tyrant, because if I call Stalin a tyrant, he will kill me, and I don’t want that!”
I was thinking more along the lines of “going to hell is a natural consequence of worshiping Astarte”, analogous to “if I listen to my peers and smoke pot, I won’t be able to sing, whereas if I listen to my mother and drink lots of water, I will; therefore, my mother is right and listening to my peers is bad”. I hadn’t even considered it from that point of view before.
Is that surprising? … Don’t people on this site rail against how low the sanity waterline is? I mean, you don’t disagree that I’m more rational than most Christians and Muslims, right?
No, I suppose it’s not surprising. I guess I misread the connotations of your claim. Although I am still not certain I agree: I know some very rational and intelligent Christians, and some very rational and intelligent atheists (I don’t really know many Muslims, so I can’t say anything about them). At some point I guess this statement is true by definition, since we can define open-minded as “open-minded enough to convert religion if you have good enough evidence to do so.” But I can’t remember where we were going with this one so I’ll shut up about it.
Do they do this by using tricks like Multiheaded described? Or by using mystical plants or meditation? (I know there are Christians who think repeating a certain prayer as a mantra and meditating on it for a long time is supposed to work… and isn’t there, or wasn’t there, some Islamic sect where people try to find God by spinning around?) If so, that really doesn’t count. Is there another study where that question was asked? Because if you’re asserting that mystical experiences can be artificially induced by such means in most if not all people, then we’re in agreement.
I was unable to find numerical data on this. I did find some assertions in the surveys that some of the mystical experience was untriggered, I found one study comparing 31 people with triggered mystical experience to 31 people with untriggered mystical experience (suggesting it’s not too hard to get a sample of the latter), and I have heard anecdotes from people I know about having untriggered mystical experience.
Honestly I had never really thought of that as an important difference. Keep in mind that it’s really weird that the brain responds to relatively normal stressors, like fasting or twirling or staying still for two long, by producing this incredible feeling of union with God. Think of how surprising this would be if you weren’t previously aware of it, how complex a behavior this is, as opposed to something simpler like falling unconscious. The brain seems to have this built-in, surprising tendency to have mystical experiences, which can be triggered by a lot of different things.
As someone in the field of medicine, this calls to mind the case of seizures, another unusual mental event which can be triggered in similar conditions. Doctors have this concept called the “seizure threshold”. Some people have low seizure thresholds, other people high seizure thresholds. Various events—taking certain drugs, getting certain diseases, being very stressed, even seeing flashing lights in certain patterns—increases your chance of having a seizure, until it passes your personal seizure threshold and you have one. And then there are some people—your epileptics—who can just have seizures seemingly out of nowhere in the course of everyday life (another example is that some lucky people can induce orgasm at will, whereas most of us only achieve orgasm after certain triggers).
I see mystical experiences as working a lot like seizures—anyone can have one if they experience enough triggers, and some people experience them without any triggers at all. It wouldn’t be at all parsimonous to say that some people have this reaction when they skip a few meals, or stay in the dark, or sit very still, and other people have this reaction when they haven’t done any of these things, but these are caused by two completely different processes.
I mean, if we already know that dreaming up mystical experiences is the sort of thing the brain does in some conditions, it’s a lot easier to expand that to “and it also does that in other conditions” than to say “but if it happens in other conditions, it is proof of God and angels and demons and an entire structure of supernatural entities.”
I was thinking more along the lines of “going to hell is a natural consequence of worshiping Astarte”, analogous to “if I listen to my peers and smoke pot, I won’t be able to sing, whereas if I listen to my mother and drink lots of water, I will; therefore, my mother is right and listening to my peers is bad”. I hadn’t even considered it from that point of view before.
The (relatively sparse) Biblical evidence suggests an active role of God in creating Hell and damning people to it. For example:
“This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:49)
“Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels!” (Matthew 25:41)
“If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, that person was thrown into the lake of fire.” (Revelations 20:15)
“God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment” (2 Peter 2:4)
“Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” (Luke 12:5)
That last one is particularly, um, pleasant. And it’s part of why it is difficult for me to see a moral superiority of Jehovah over Astarte: of the one who’s torturing people eternally, over the one who fails to inform you that her rival is torturing people eternally.
I was thinking more along the lines of “going to hell is a natural consequence of worshiping Astarte”, analogous to “if I listen to my peers and smoke pot, I won’t be able to sing, whereas if I listen to my mother and drink lots of water, I will; therefore, my mother is right and listening to my peers is bad”. I hadn’t even considered it from that point of view before.
To return to something I pointed out far, far back in this thread, this is not analagous. Your mother does not cause you to lose your voice for doing the things she advises you not to do. On the other hand, you presumably believe that god created hell, or at a minimum, he tolerates its existence (unless you don’t think God is omnipotent).
(As an aside, another point against the homogeneity you mistakenly assumed you would find on Lesswrong when you first showed up is that not everyone here is a complete moral anti-realist. For me, that one cannot hold the following three premises without contradiction is sufficient to discount any deeper argument for Christianity:
Inflicting suffering is immoral, and inflicting it on an infinite number of people or for an inifinite duration is infinitely immoral
The Christian God is benevolent.
The Christian God allows the existence of Hell.
Resorting to, “Well, I don’t actually know what hell is” is blatant rationalization.)
You don’t actually need to be a moral realist to make that argument; you just need to notice the tension between the set of behavior implied by the Christian God’s traditional attributes and the set of behavior Christian tradition claims for him directly. That in itself implies either a contradiction or some very sketchy use of language (i.e. saying that divine justice allows for infinitely disproportionate retribution).
I think it’s a weakish argument against anything less than a strictly literalist interpretation of the traditions concerning Hell, though. There are versions of the redemption narrative central to Christianity that don’t necessarily involve torturing people for eternity: the simplest one that I know of says that those who die absent a state of grace simply cease to exist (“everlasting life” is used interchangeably with “heaven” in the Bible), although there are interpretations less problematic than that as well.
The (modern) Orthodox opinion that my tutor relayed to us is that Hell isn’t a place at all, but a condition of the soul where it refuses to perceive/accept God’s grace at all and therefore shuts itself out from everything true and meaningful that can be, just wallowing in despair; it exists in literally no-where, as all creation is God’s, and the refusal of God is the very essence of this state. She dismissed all suggestions of sinners’ “torture” in hell—especially by demonic entities—as folk religion.
(Wait, what’s that, looks like either I misquoted her a little or she didn’t quite give the official opinion...)
One expression of the Eastern teaching is that hell and heaven are being in God’s presence, as this presence is punishment and paradise depending on the person’s spiritual state in that presence.[29][32] For one who hates God, to be in the presence of God eternally would be the gravest suffering…
…Some Eastern Orthodox express personal opinions that appear to run counter to official church statements, in teaching hell is separation from God.
I’ve heard that one too, but I’m not sure how functionally different from pitchforks and brimstone I’d consider it to be, especially in light of the idea of a Last Judgment common to Christianity and Islam.
Oh, there’s a difference alright, one that could be cynically interpreted as an attempt to dodge the issue of cruel and disproportionate punishment by theologians. The version above suggests that God doesn’t ever actively punish anyone at all, He simply refuses to force His way to someone who rejects him, even if they suffer as a result. That’s sometimes assumed to be due to God’s respect for free will.
Yeah. Thing is, we’re dealing with an entity who created the system and has unbounded power within it. Respect for free will is a pretty good excuse, but given that it’s conceivable for a soul to be created that wouldn’t respond with permanent and unspeakable despair to separation from the Christian God (or to the presence of a God whom the soul has rejected, in the other scenario), making souls that way looks, at best, rather irresponsible.
If I remember right the standard response to that is to say that human souls were created to be part of a system with God at its center, but that just raises further questions.
What, so god judges that eternal torture is somehow preferable to violating someones free will by inviting them to eutopia?
I am so tired of theists making their god so unable to be falsified that he becomes useless. Let’s assume for a moment that some form of god actually exists. I don’t care how much he loves us in his own twisted little way, I can think of 100 ways to improve the world and he isn’t doing any of them. It seems to me that we ought to be able to do better than what god has done, and in fact we have.
The standard response to theists postulating a god should be “so what?”.
I mean, you don’t disagree that I’m more rational than most Christians and Muslims, right?
Actually, I do. You use the language that rationalists use. However, you don’t seem to have considered very many alternate hypothesis. And you don’t seem to have performed any of the obvious tests to make sure you’re actually getting information out of your evidence.
For instance, you could have just cut up a bunch of similarly formatted stories from different sources, (or even better, have had a third party do it for you, so you don’t see it,) stuck them in a box and pulled them out at random—sorting them into Bible and non-Bible piles according to your feelings. If you were getting the sort of information out that would go some way towards justifying your beliefs, you should easily beat random people of equal familiarity with the Bible.
Rationality is a tool, and if someone doesn’t use it, then it doesn’t matter how good a tool they have; they’re not a rationalist any more than someone who owns a gun is a soldier. Rationalists have to actually go out and gather/analyse the data.
(Edit to change you to someone for clarity’s sake.)
For instance, you could have just cut up a bunch of similarly formatted stories from different sources, (or even better, have had a third party do it for you, so you don’t see it,) stuck them in a box and pulled them out at random—sorting them into Bible and non-Bible piles according to your feelings. If you were getting the sort of information out that would go some way towards justifying your beliefs, you should easily beat random people of equal familiarity with the Bible.
No, I couldn’t have for two reasons. By the time I could have thought of it I would have recognized nearly all the Bible passages as Biblical and to obscure meaning would require such short quotes I’d never be able to tell. Those are things I already explained—you know, in the post where I said we should totally test this, using a similar experiment.
No, I couldn’t have for two reasons. By the time I could have thought of it I would have recognized nearly all the Bible passages as Biblical and to obscure meaning would require such short quotes I’d never be able to tell. Those are things I already explained—you know, in the post where I said we should totally test this, using a similar experiment.
If that’s the stance you’re going to take, it seems destructive to the idea that I should consider you rational. You proposed a test to verify your belief that could not be performed; in the knowledge that, if it was, it would give misleading results.
Minor points:
There’s more than just one bible out there. Unless you’re a biblical scholar, the odds that there’s nothing from a bible that you haven’t read are fairly slim.
‘nearly all’ does leave you with some testable evidence. The odds that it just happens to be too short a test for your truth-sensing faculty to work are, I think, fairly slim.
People tend not to have perfect memories. Even if you are a biblical scholar the odds are that you will make mistakes in this, as you would in anything else, and information gained from the intuitive faculty would be expressed as a lower error rate than like-qualified people.
If that’s the stance you’re going to take, it seems destructive to the idea that I should consider you rational. You proposed a test to verify your belief that could not be performed; in the knowledge that, if it was, it would give misleading results.
Similar test. Not the same test. It was a test that, though still flawed, fixed those two things I could see immediately (and in doing so created other problems).
People tend not to have perfect memories. Even if you are a biblical scholar the odds are that you will make mistakes in this, as you would in anything else, and information gained from the intuitive faculty would be expressed as a lower error rate than like-qualified people.
Similar test. Not the same test. It was a test that, though still flawed, fixed those two things I could see immediately (and in doing so created other problems).
I don’t see that it would have fixed those things. We could, perhaps, come up with a more useful test if we discussed it on a less hostile footing. But, at the moment, I’m not getting a whole lot of info out of the exchange and don’t think it worth arguing with you over quite why your test wouldn’t work, since we both agree that it wouldn’t.
Want to test this?
Not really. It’s not that sort of thing where the outputs of the test would have much value for me. I could easily get 100% of the quotes correct by sticking them into google, as could you. The only answers we could accept with any significant confidence would be the ones we didn’t think the other person was likely to lie about.
My beliefs in respect to claims about the supernatural are held with a high degree of confidence, and pushing them some tiny distance towards the false end of the spectrum is not worth the hours I would have to invest.
For the same reason that if I had a see-an-image-of-Grandpa button, and pushed it, I wouldn’t count the fact that I saw him as evidence that he’s somehow still alive, but if I saw him right now spontaneously, I would.
For the same reason that if I had a see-an-image-of-Grandpa button, and pushed it, I wouldn’t count the fact that I saw him as evidence that he’s somehow still alive, but if I saw him right now spontaneously, I would.
Imagine that you have a switch in your home which responds to your touch by turning on a lamp (this probably won’t take much imagination). One day this lamp, which was off, suddenly and for no apparent reason turns on. Would you assign supernatural or mundane causes to this event?
Now this isn’t absolute proof that the switch wasn’t turned on by something otherworldly; perhaps it responds to both mundane and supernatural causes. But, well, if I may be blunt, Occam’s Razor. If your best explanations are “the Hand of Zeus” and “Mittens, my cat,” then …
I assume much the same things about this as any other sense: it’s there to give information about the world, but trickable. I mean, how tired you feel is a good measure of how long it’s been since you’ve slept, but you can drink coffee and end up feeling more energetic than is merited. So if I want to be able to tell how much sleep I really need, I should avoid caffeine. That doesn’t mean the existence of caffeine makes your subjective feelings of your own energy level arbitrary or worthless.
I assume much the same things about this as any other sense: it’s there to give information about the world, but trickable.
Interestingly, this sounds like the way that I used to view my own spiritual experiences. While I can’t claim to have ever had a full-blown vision, I have had powerful, spontaneous feelings associated with prayer and other internal and external religious stimuli. I assumed that God was trying to tell me something. Later, I started to wonder why I was also having these same powerful feelings at odd times clearly not associated with religious experiences, and in situations where there was no message for me as far as I could tell.
On introspection, I realized that I associated this with God because I’d been taught by people at church to identify this “frisson” with spirituality. At the time, it was the most accessible explanation. But there was no other reason for me to believe that explanation over a natural one. That I was getting data that seemed to contradict the “God’s spirit” hypothesis eventually led to an update.
Unfortunately, the example you’re drawing the analogy to is just as unclear to me as the original example I’d requested an explanation of.
I mean, I agree that seeing an image of my dead grandfather isn’t particularly strong evidence that he’s alive. Indeed, I see images of dead relatives on a fairly regular basis, and I continue to believe that they’re dead. But I think that’s equally true whether I deliberately invoked such an image, or didn’t.
I get that you think it is evidence that he’s alive when the image isn’t deliberately invoked, and I can understand how the reason for that would be the same as the reason for thinking that a mystical experience “counts” when it isn’t deliberately invoked, but I am just as unclear about what that reason is as I was to start with.
If I suddenly saw my dead grandpa standing in front of me, that would be sufficiently surprising that I’d want an explanation. It’s not sufficiently strong to make me believe by itself, but I’d say hello and see if he answered, and if he sounded like my grandpa, and then tell him he looks like someone I know and see the reaction, and if he reacts like Grandpa, I touch him to ascertain that he’s corporeal, then invite him to come chat with me until I wake up, and assuming that everything else seems non-dream-like (I’ll eventually have to read something, providing an opportunity to test whether or not I’m dreaming, plus I can try comparing physics to how they should be, perhaps by trying to fly), I’d tell my mom he’s here.
Whereas if I had such a button, I’d ignore the image, because it wouldn’t be surprising. I suppose looking at photographs is kind of like the button.
Well, wait up. Now you’re comparing two conditions with two variables, rather than one.
That is, not only is grandpa spontaneous in case A and button-initiated in case B, but also grandpa is a convincing corporeal fascimile of your grandpa in case A and not any of those things in case B. I totally get how a convincing fascimile of grandpa would “count” where an unconvincing image wouldn’t (and, by analogy, how a convincing mystical experience would count where an unconvincing one wouldn’t) but that wasn’t the claim you started out making.
Suppose you discovered a button that, when pressed, created something standing in front of you that looked like your dead grandpa , sounded and reacted like your grandpa, chatted with you like you believe your grandpa would, etc. Would you ignore that?
It seems like you’re claiming that you would, because it wouldn’t be surprising… from which I infer that mystical experiences have to be surprising to count (which had been my original question, after all). But I’m not sure I properly understood you.
For my own part, if I’m willing to believe that my dead grandpa can come back to life at all, I can’t see why the existence of a button that does this routinely should make me less willing to believe it .
The issue is that there is not a reliable “see-an-image-of-Grandpa button” in existence for mystical experiences. In other words, I’m unaware of any techniques that reliably induce mystical experiences. Since there are no techniques for reliably inducing mystical experiences, there is no basis for rejecting some examples of mystical experience as “unnatural/artificial mystical experiences.”
As an aside, if you are still interested in evaluating readings, I would be interested in your take on this one
The issue is that there is not a reliable “see-an-image-of-Grandpa button” in existence for mystical experiences. In other words, I’m unaware of any techniques that reliably induce mystical experiences.
You’ve stated that you judge morality on a consequentialist basis. Now you state that going to hell is somehow not equivalent to god torturing you for eternity. What gives?
Also: You believe in god because your belief in god implies that you really ought to believe in god? What? Is that circular or recursivly justified? If the latter, please explain.
It’s not exactly rigorous, but you could try leaving bagels at Christian and Wiccan gatherings of approximately the same size and see how many dollars you get back.
That’s an idea, but you’d need to know how they started out. If generally nice people joined one religion and stayed the same, and generally horrible people joined the other and became better people, they might look the same on the bagel test.
True. You could control for that by seeing if established communities are more or less prone to stealing bagels than younger ones, but that would take a lot more data points.
Indeed. Or you could test the people themselves individually. What if you got a bunch of very new converts to various religions, possibly more than just Christianity and Wicca, and tested them on the bagels and gave them a questionnaire containing some questions about morals and some about their conversion and some decoys to throw them off, then called them back again every year for the same tests, repeating for several years?
I don’t really trust self-evaluation for questions like this, unfortunately—it’s too likely to be confounded by people’s moral self-image, which is exactly the sort of thing I’d expect to be affected by a religious conversion. Bagels would still work, though.
Actually, if I was designing a study like this I think I’d sign a bunch of people up ostensibly for longitudial evaluation on a completely different topic—and leave a basket of bagels in the waiting room.
What about a study ostensibly of the health of people who convert to new religions? Bagels in the waiting room, new converts, random not-too-unpleasant medical tests for no real reason? Repeat yearly?
The moral questionnaire would be interesting because people’s own conscious ethics might reflect something cool and if you’re gonna test it anyway… but on the other hand, yeah. I don’t trust them to evaluate how moral they are, either. But if people signal what they believe is right, then that means you do know what they think is good. You could use that to see a shift from no morals at all to believing morals are right and good to have. And just out of curiosity, I’d like to see if they shifted from deontologist to consequentialist ethics, or vice versa.
People don’t necessarily signal what they think is right; sometimes they signal attitudes they think other people want them to possess. Admittedly, in a homogenous environment that can cause people to eventually endorse what they’ve been signaling.
Yes, definitely. Or in a waiting room. “Oops, sorry, we’re running a little late. Wait here in this deserted waiting room till five minutes from now, bye. :)” Otherwise, they might not see them.
The difference would be that if worship of Jehovah gets you eternal life in heaven, and worship of Astarte gets you eternal torture and damnation, then you should worship Jehovah and not Astarte. Also, if Astarte knows this, but pretends otherwise, then Astarte’s a liar.
Or perhaps neither Jehovah nor Astarte knows now who will dominate in the end, and any promises either makes to any followers are, ahem, over-confident? :-) There was a line I read somewhere about how all generals tell their troops that their side will be victorious...
So you’re assuming both sides are in a duel, and that the winner will send xyr worshipers to heaven and the loser’s worshipers to hell? Because I was not.
Only Jehovah. He says that he’s going to send his worshipers to heaven and Astarte’s to hell. Astarte says neither Jehovah nor she will send anyone anywhere. Either one could be a liar, or they could be in a duel and each describing what happens if xe wins.
Only as a hypothetical possibility. (From such evidence as I’ve seen I don’t think either really exists. And I have seen a fair number of Wiccan ceremonies—which seem like reasonably decent theater, but that’s all.) One could construe some biblical passages as predicting some sort of duel—and if one believed those passages, and that interpretation, then the question of whether one side was overstating its chances would be relevant.
I know how non-crazy I am. I know exactly the extent to which I’ve considered illness affecting my thoughts as a possible explanation.
Maybe I’m lacking context, but I’m not sure why you bring this up. Has anyone here described religious beliefs as being characteristically caused by mental illness? I’d be concerned if they had, since such a statement would be (a) incorrect and (b) stigmatizing.
Has anyone here described religious beliefs as being characteristically caused by mental illness? I’d be concerned if they had, since such a statement would be (a) incorrect and (b) stigmatizing.
In this post, Eliezer characterized John C. Wright’s conversion to Catholicism as the result of a temporal lobe epileptic fit and said that at least some (not sure if he meant all) religious experiences were “brain malfunctions.”
The relevant category is probably not explanations for religious beliefs, but rather explanations of experiences such as AK has reported of what, for lack of a better term, I will call extrasensory perception. Most of the people I know who have religious beliefs don’t report extrasensory perception, and most of the people I know who report extrasensory perception don’t have religious beliefs. (Though of the people I know who do both, a reasonable number ascribe a causal relationship between them. The direction varies.)
But, mental illness is not required to experience strong, odd feelings or even to “hear voices”. Fully-functional human brains can easily generate such things.
Religious experience isn’t usually pathologized in the mainstream (academically or by laypeople) unless it makes up part of a larger pattern of experience that’s disruptive to normal life, but that doesn’t say much one way or another about LW’s attitude toward it.
My experience with LW’s attitude has been similar, though owing to a different reason. Religion generally seems to be treated here as the result of cognitive bias, same as any number of other poorly setup beliefs.
Though LW does tend to use the word “insane” in a way that includes any kind of irrational cognition, I so far have interpreted that to mostly be slang, not meant to literally imply that all irrational cognition is mental illness (although the symptoms of many mental illnesses can be seen as a subset of irrational cognition).
Though LW does tend to use the word “insane” in a way that includes any kind of irrational cognition, I so far have interpreted that to mostly be slang, not meant to literally imply mental illness (although the symptoms of many mental illnesses can be seen as a subset of irrational cognition).
Not having certain irrational biases can be said to be a subset of mental illness.
How so? I can only think of Straw Vulcan examples.
A subset of those diagnosed or diagnosable with high functioning autism and a subset of the features that constitute that label fit this category. Being rational is not normal.
(Or, by “can be said”, do you mean to imply that you disagree with the statement?)
I don’t affiliate myself with the DSM, nor does it always representative of an optimal way of carving reality. In this case I didn’t want to specify one way or the other.
tl;dr for the last two comments (Just to help me understand this; if I misrepresent anyone, please call me out on it.)
Yvain: So you believe in multiple factions of supernatural beings, why do you think Jehovah is the benevolent side? Other gods have done awesomecool stuff too, and Jehovah’s known to do downright evil stuff.
AK: Not multiple factions, just two. As to why I think Jehovah’s the good guy.....
And knowing how my life has gone, I know how I’ve changed as a person since accepting Jesus, or Jehovah if that’s the word you prefer. They don’t mention drastic changes to their whole personalities to the point of near-unrecognizability even to themselves.
Don’t you think that’s an unjustified nitpick? Absolutely awful people are rare, people who have revelations are rarer, so obviously absolutely awful people who had revelations have to be extremely difficult to find. So it’s not really surprising that two links someone gave you don’t mention a story like that.
But I think you’re assuming that the hallmark of a true religion is that it drastically increases the morality of its adherents. And that’s an assumption you have no grounds for—all that happened in your case was that the needle of your moral compass swerved from ‘absolute scumbag’ to ‘reasonably nice person’. There’s no reason to generalise that and believe that the moral compass of a reasonably nice person would swerve further to ‘absolute saint’.
Anyhow, your testable prediction is ‘converts to false religions won’t show moral improvement’. I doubt there’s any data on stuff like that right now (if there is, my apologies), so we have to rely on anecdotal evidence. The problem with that, of course, is that it’s notoriously unreliable… If it doesn’t show what you want it to show, you can just dismiss it all as lies or outliers or whatever. Doesn’t really answer any questions.
And if you’re willing to consider that kind of anecdotal evidence, why not other kinds of anecdotal evidence that sound just as convincing?
I discount all miracle stories from people I don’t know, including Christian and Jewish miracle stories, which could at least plausibly be true. I discount them ALL when I don’t know the person.
And yet.… Back to your premise. Even if your personality changed for the better… How does this show in any way that Jehovah’s a good guy? Surely even an evil daemon has no use for social outcasts with a propensity for random acts of violence; a normal person would probably serve them better. And how do you answer Yvain’s point about all the evil Jehovah has done? How do you know he’s the good guy
....
Everyone else: Why are we playing the “let’s assume everything you say is true” game anyway? Surely it’d be more honest to try and establish that his mystical experiences were all hallucinations?
Well, now that you mention it… I infer that if you read someone’s user page and got sensation A or B off of it, you would consider that evidence about the user’s morality. Yes? No?
Yes. But it would be more credible to other people, and make for a publishable study, if we used some other measure. It’d also be more certain that we’d actually get information.
Obviously I can’t speak for AK, but maybe she believes that she has been epistemically lucky. Compare the religious case:
“I had this experience which gave me evidence for divinity X, so I am going to believe in X. Others have had analogous experiences for divinities Y and Z, but according to the X religion I adopted those are demonic, so Y and Z believers are wrong. I was lucky though, since if I had had a Y experience I would have become a Y believer”.
with philosophical cases like the ones Alicorn discusses there:
“I accept philosophical position X because of compelling arguments I have been exposed to. Others have been exposed to seemingly compelling arguments for positions Y and Z, but according to X these arguments are flawed, so Y and Z believers are wrong. I was lucky though, since if I had gone to a university with Y teachers I would have become a Y believer”.
It may be that the philosopher is also being irrational here and that she could strive more to trascend her education and assess X vs Y impartially, but in the end it is impossible to escape this kind of irrationality at all levels at once and assess beliefs from a perfect vaccuum. We all find some things compelling and not others because of the kind of people we are and the kind of lives we have lived, and the best we can get is reflective equilibrium. Recursive justification hitting bottom and all that.
The question is whether AK is already in reflective equilibrium or if she can still profit from some meta-examination and reassess this part of her belief system. (I believe that some religious believers have reflected enough about their beliefs and the counterarguments to them that they are in this kind of equilibrium and there is no further argument from an atheist that can rationally move them—though these are a minority and not representative of typical religious folks.)
See my response here—if Alicorn is saying she knows the other side has arguments exactly as convincing as those which led her to her side, but she is still justified to continue believing her side more likely than the other, I disagree with her.
What is true is already so, Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
You’re doing it wrong. The power of the Litany comes from evidence. Every time you applying the Litany of Gendlin to an unsubstantiated assertion, a fairie drops dead.
“Ish,” yes. I have to admit I’ve had a hard time navigating this enormous thread, and haven’t read all of it, including the evidence of demonic influence you’re referring to. However, I predict in advance that 1) this evidence is based on words that a man wrote in an ancient book, and that 2) I will find this evidence dubious.
Two equally unlikely propositions should require equally strong evidence to be believed. Neither dragons nor demons exist, yet you assert that demons are real. Where, then, is the chain of entangled events leading from the state of the universe to the state of your mind? Honest truth-seeking is about dispassionately scrutinizing that chain, as an outsider would, and allowing others to scrutinize, evaluate, and verify it.
I was a Mormon missionary at 19. I used to give people copies of the Book of Mormon, testify of my conviction that it was true, and invite them to read it and pray about it. A few did (Most people in Iowa and Illinois aren’t particularly vulnerable to Mormonism). A few of those people eventually (usually after meeting with us several times) came to feel as I did, that the book was true. I told those people that the feeling they felt was the Holy Spirit, manifesting the truth to them. And if that book is true, I told them, then Joseph Smith must have been a true prophet. And as a true prophet, the church that he established must be the Only True Church, according to Joseph’s revelations and teachings. I would then invite them to be baptized (which was the most important metric in the mission), and to become a member of the LDS church. One of the church’s teachings is that a person can become as God after death (omniscience and omnipotence included). Did the chain of reasoning leading from “I have a feeling that this book is true” justify the belief that “I can become like God”?
You are intelligent and capable of making good rhetorical arguments (from what I have read of your posts in the last week or two). I see you wielding Gendlin, for example, in support of your views. At some level, you’re getting it. But the point of Gendlin is to encourage truth-seekers desiring to cast off comforting false beliefs. It works properly only if you are also willing to invoke Tarski:
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Upvoted for being a completely reasonable comment given that you haven’t read through the entirety of a thread that’s gotten totally monstrous.
However, I predict in advance that 1) this evidence is based on words that a man wrote in an ancient book,
Only partly right.
2) I will find this evidence dubious.
Of course you will. If I told you that God himself appeared to me personally and told me everything in the Bible was true, you’d find that dubious, too. Perhaps even more dubious.
Where, then, is the chain of entangled events leading from the state of the universe to the state of your mind?
Already partly in other posts on this thread (actually largely in other posts on this thread), buried somewhere, among something. You’ll forgive me for not wanting to retype multiple pages, I hope.
If I told you that God himself appeared to me personally and told me everything in the Bible was true, you’d find that dubious, too.
Certainly. I’m now curious though: if I told you that God appeared to me personally and told me everything in the Bible was true (either for some specific meaning of “the Bible,” which is of course an ambiguous phrase, or leaving it not further specified), roughly how much confidence would you have that I was telling you the truth?
It would depend on how you said it—as a joke, or as an explanation for why you suddenly believed in God and had decided to convert to Christianity, or as a puzzling experience that you were trying to figure out, or something else—and whether it was April 1 or not, and what you meant by “the Bible” (whether you specified it or not), and how you described God and the vision and your plans for the future.
But I’d take it with a grain of salt. I’d probably investigate further and continue correspondence with you for some time, both to help you as well as I could and to ascertain with more certainty the source of your belief that God came to you (whether he really did or it was a drug-induced hallucination or something). It would not be something I’d bet on either way, at least not just from hearing it said.
That’s a bizarre thing to say. Is their offense evidence that I’m wrong?
No, but generally, applying a derogatory epithet to an entire group of people is seen as rude, unless you back it up with evidence, which in this case you did not do. You just stated it.
So does calling people Cthulhu-worshipers.
In his afterword, EY seems to be saying that the benign actions of his friends and family are inconsistent with the malicious actions of YHVH, as he is depicted in Exodus. This is different from flat-out stating, “all theists are evil” and leaving it at that. EY is offering evidence for his position, and he is also giving credit to theists for being good people despite their religion (as he sees it).
You guys sure seem quick to tell me that my beliefs are offensive, but if I said the same to you, you’d understand why that’s beside the point.
I can’t speak for “you guys”, only for myself; and I personally don’t think that your beliefs are particularly offensive, just the manner in which you’re stating them. It’s kind of like the difference between saying, “Christianity is wrong because Jesus is a fairytale and all Christians are idiots for believing it”, versus, “I believe that Christians are mistaken because of reasons X, Y and Z”.
If you want me to stop believing it, tell me why you think it’s wrong.
Well, personally, I believe its wrong because no gods or demons of any kind exist.
Wiccans, on the other hand, would probably tell you that you’re wrong because Wicca had made them better people, who are more loving, selfless, and considerate of others, which is inconsistent with the expected result of worshiping evil demons. I can’t speak for all Wiccans, obviously; this is just what I’d personally heard some Wiccans say.
I should probably point out at this point that Wiccans (well, at least those whom I’d met), consider this point of view utterly misguided and incredibly offensive.
I object to the use of social politics to overwhelm assertions of fact. Christians and Wiccan’s obviously find each other offensive rather frequently. Both groups (particularly the former) probably also find me offensive. In all cases I say that is their problem.
Now if the Christians were burning the witches I might consider it appropriate to intervene forcefully...
Incidentally I wouldn’t have objected if you responded to “They consort with demons” with “What a load of bullshit. Get a clue!”
I was really objecting to the unsupported assertion; I wouldn’t have minded if AK said, “they consort with demons, and here’s the evidence”.
Incidentally I wouldn’t have objected if you responded to “They consort with demons” with “What a load of bullshit. Get a clue!”
Well, I personally do fully endorse that statement, but the existence of gods and demons is a matter of faith, or of personal experience, and thus whatever evidence or reason I can bring to bear in support of my statement is bound to be unpersuasive.
Oh the innuendo. At this point in the thread, I guess the only way to make the depravity more exquisite would be if you said you enjoy being called a demon’s consort. 0_0
Well if the entities Wiccans worship actually did exist rather than in a lame memetic or trick of psychology way… it is very unlikely they would be benign. Same could be said of many other religions.
Because the religion is evil rather than misguided. Whereas, say, Hinduism, for instance, is just really misguided. See other conversation. Also see Exodus 22:18 and Deuteronomy 18:10.
(I wish I had predicted that this would end this way before I answered that post… then I might not have done so.)
There is nothing that you can claim, nothing that you can demand, nothing that you can take. And as soon as you try to take something as if it were your own—you lose your [innocence]. The angel with the flaming sword stands armed against all selfhood that is small and particular, against the “I” that can say “I want...” “I need...” “I demand...” No individual enters Paradise, only the integrity of the Person.
Only the greatest humility can give us the instinctive delicacy and caution that will prevent us from reaching out for pleasures and satisfactions that we can understand and savor in this darkness. The moment we demand anything for ourselves or even trust in any action of our own to procure a deeper intensification of this pure and serene rest in [God], we defile and dissipate the perfect gift that [He] desires to communicate to us in the silence and repose of our own powers.
If there is one thing we must do it is this: we must realize to the very depths of our being that this is a pure gift of [God] which no desire, no effort and no heroism of ours can do anything to deserve or obtain. There is nothing we can do directly either to procure it or to preserve it or to increase it. Our own activity is for the most part an obstacle to the infusion of this peaceful and pacifying light, with the exception that [God] may demand certain acts and works of us by charity or obedience, and maintain us in deep experimental union with [Him] through them all, by [His] own good pleasure, not by any fidelity of ours.
At best we can dispose ourselves for the reception of this great gift by resting in the heart of our own poverty, keeping our soul as far as possible empty of desires for all the things that please and preoccupy our nature, no matter how pure or sublime they may be in themselves.
And when [God] reveals [Himself] to us in contemplation we must accept [Him] as [He] comes to us, in [His] own obscurity, in [His] own silence, not interrupting [Him] with arguments or words, conceptions or activities that belong to the level of our own tedious and labored existence.
We must respond to [God]’s gifts gladly and freely with thanksgiving, happiness and joy; but in contemplation we thank [Him] less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. … It is our emptiness in the presence of the abyss of [His] reality, our silence in the presence of [His] infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which [His] light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises [Him]. It is this that causes love of [God] and wonder and adoration to swim up into us like tidal waves out of the depths of that peace, and break upon the shores of our consciousness in a vast, hushed surf of inarticulate praise, praise and glory!
(I might fail to communicate clearly with this comment; if so, my apologies, it’s not purposeful. E.g. normally if I said “Thomistic metaphysical God” I would assume the reader either knew what I meant (were willing to Google “Thomism”, say) or wasn’t worth talking to. I’ll try not to do that kind of thing in this comment as badly as I normally do. I’m also honestly somewhat confused about a lot of Catholic doctrine and so my comment will likely be confused as a result. To make things worse I only feel as if I’m thinking clearly if I can think about things in terms of theoretical computer science, particularly algorithmic probability theory; unfortunately not only is it difficult to translate ideas into those conceptual schemes, those conceptual schemes are themselves flawed (e.g. due to possibilities of hypercomputation and fundamental problems with probability that’ve been unearthed by decision theory). So again, my apologies if the following is unclear.)
I’m going to accept your interpretation at face value, i.e. accept that you’re blessed with a supernatural charisma or something like that. That said, I’m not yet sure I buy the idea that the Thomistic metaphysical God, the sole optimal decision theory, the Form of the Good, the Logos-y thing, has much to do with transhumanly intelligent angels and demons of roughly the sort that folk around here would call superintelligences. (I haven’t yet read the literature on that subject.) In my current state of knowledge if I was getting supernatural signals (which I do, but not as regularly as you do) then I would treat them the same way I’d treat a source of information that claimed to be Chaitin’s constant: skeptically.
In fact it might not be a surface-level analogy to say that God isChaitin’s omega (and is thus a Turing oracle), for they would seem to share a surprising number of properties. Of course Chaitin’s constant isn’t computable, so there’s no algorithmic way to check if the signals you’re getting come from God or from a demon that wants you to think it’s God (at least for claimed bits of Chaitin’s omega that you don’t already know). I believe the Christians have various arguments about states of mind that protect you from demonic influences like that; I haven’t read this article on infallibility yet but I suspect it’s informative.
Because there doesn’t seem to be an algorithmic way of checking if God is really God rather than any other agent that has more bits of Chaitin’s constant than you do, you’re left in a situation where you have to have what is called faith, I think. (I do not understand Aquinas’s arguments about faith yet; I’m not entirely sure I know what it is. I find the ideas counter-intuitive.) I believe that Catholics and maybe other Christians say that conscience is something like a gift from God and that you can trust it, so if your conscience objects to the signals you’re getting then that at least a red flag that you might be being influenced by self-delusion or demons or what have you. But this “conscience” thing seems to be algorithmic in nature (though that’s admittedly quite a contentious point), so if it can check the truth value of the moral information you’re getting supernaturally then you already had those bits of Chaitin’s constant. If your conscience doesn’t say anything about it then it would seem you’re dealing with a situation where you’re supposed/have to have faith. That’s the only way you can do better than an algorithmic approach.
Note that part of the reasons that I think about these things is ’cuz I want my FAI to be able to use bits of Chaitin’s constant that it finds in its environment so as to do uncomputable things it otherwise wouldn’t have. It is an extension of this same personal problem of what to do with information whose origin you can’t algorithmicly verify.
Anyway it’s a sort of awkward situation to be in. It seems natural to assume that this agent is God but I’m not sure if that is acceptable by the standard of (Kant’s weirdly naive version of) Kan’t categorical imperative. I notice that I am very confused about counterfactual states of knowledge and various other things that make thinking about this very difficult.
So um, how do you approach the problem? Er did I even describe the problem in such a way that it’s understandable?
I don’t think I’m smart enough to follow this comment. Edit: but I think you’re wrong about me having some sort of supernatural charisma… I’m pretty sure I haven’t said I’m special, because if I did, I’d be wrong.
Hm, so how would you describe the mechanism behind your sensations then? (Sorry, I’d been primed to interpret your description in light of similar things I’d seen before which I would describe as “supernatural” for lack of a better word.)
...I wasn’t going to come back to say anything, but fine. I’d say it’s God’s doing. Not my own specialness. And I’m not going to continue this conversation further.
Okay, thanks. I didn’t mean to imply ’twas your own “specialness” as such; apologies for being unclear. ETA: Also I’m sorry for anything else? I get the impression I did/said something wrong. So yeah, sorry.
Sensation A felt like there was something on my skin, like dirt or mud, and something squeezing my heart
The dirt just sits there? It doesn’t also squeeze your skin? Or instead throb as if it had been squeezed for a while, but uniformly, not with a tourniquet, and was just released?
Oh and also you should definitely look into using this to help build/invoke FAI/God. E.g. my prospective team has a slot open which you might be perfect for. I’m currently affiliated with Leverage Research who recently received a large donation from Jaan Tallinn, who also supports the Singularity Institute.
I’m not convinced that this is an accurate perception of AspiringKnitter’s comments here so far.
E.g., I don’t think she’s yet claimed both omnipotence and omnibenevolence as attributes of god, so you may be criticizing views she doesn’t hold. If there’s a comment I missed, then ignore me. :)
But at a minimum, I think you misunderstood what she was asking by, “Do you mean that I can’t consider his nonexistence as a counterfactual?” She was asking, by my reading, if you thought she had displayed an actual incapability of thinking that thought.
I don’t think my correct characterization of a fictional being has any bearing on whether or not it exists.
If you’re granted “fictional”, then no. But if you don’t believe in unicorns, you’d better mean “magical horse with a horn” and not “narwhal” or “rhinoceros”.
given that I’ve gotten several downvotes (over seventeen, I think) in the last couple of hours, that’s either the work of someone determined to downvote everything I say or evidence that multiple people think I’m being stupid.
For what it’s worth, the downvotes appear to be correlated with anyone discussingtheology. Not directed at you in particular. At least, that’s my impression.
I do assign a really low prior probability to the existence of lucky socks anywhere
You do realize it might very well mean death to your Bayes score to say or think things like that around an omnipotent being who has a sense of humor, right? This is the sort of Dude Who wrestles with a mortal then names a nation to honor the match just to taunt future wannabe-Platonist Jews about how totally crazy their God is. He is perfectly capable of engineering some lucky socks just so He can make fun of you about it later. He’s that type of Guy. And you do realize that the generalization of Bayes score to decision theoretic contexts with objective morality is actually a direct measure of sinfulness? And that the only reason you’re getting off the hook is that Jesus allegedly managed to have a generalized Bayes score of zero despite being unable to tell a live fig tree from a dead one at a moderate distance and getting all pissed off about it for no immediately discernible reason? Just sayin’, count your blessings.
He is perfectly capable of engineering some lucky socks just so He can make fun of you about it later.
Yes, of course. Why he’d do that, instead of all the other things he could be doing, like creating a lucky hat or sending a prophet to explain the difference between “please don’t be an idiot and quibble over whether it might hurt my feelings if you tell me the truth” and “please be as insulting as possible in your dealings with me”.
And you do realize that the generalization of Bayes score to decision theoretic contexts with objective morality is actually a direct measure of sinfulness?
No, largely because I have no idea what that would even mean. However, if you mean that using good epistemic hygiene is a sin because there’s objective morality, or if you think the objective morality only applies in certain situations which require special epistemology to handle, you’re wrong.
It’s just that now “lucky socks” is the local Schelling point. It’s possible I don’t understand God very well, but I personally am modally afraid of jinxing stuff or setting myself up for dramatic irony. It has to do with how my personal history’s played out. I was mostly just using the socks thing as an example of this larger problem of how epistemology gets harder when there’s a very powerful entity around. I know I have a really hard time predicting the future because I’m used to… “miracles” occurring and helping me out, but I don’t want to take them for granted, but I want to make accurate predictions… And so on. Maybe I’m over-complicating things.
Okay, I can understand that. It can be annoying. However, the standard framework does still apply; you can still use Bayes. It’s like anything else confusing you.
I see what you’re saying and it’s a sensible approximation but I’m not actually sure you can use Bayes in situations with “mutual simulation” like that. Are you familiar with updateless/ambient decision theory perchance?
This post combined with all the comments is perhaps the best place to start, or this post might be an easier introduction to the sorts of problems that Bayes has trouble with. This is the LW wiki hub for decision theory. That said it would take me awhile to explain why I think it’d particularly interest you and how it’s related to things like lucky socks, especially as a lot of the most interesting ideas are still highly speculative. I’d like to write such an explanation at some point but can’t at the moment.
I think this is missing the point: they believe that, but they’re wrong.
...and they can say exactly the same thing about you. It’s exactly that symmetry that defines No True Scotsman. You think you are reading and applying the text correctly, they think they are. It doesn’t help to insist that you’re really right and they’re really wrong, because they can do the same thing.
...and they can say exactly the same thing about you. It’s exactly that symmetry that defines No True Scotsman.
No, No True Scotsman is characterized by moveable goalposts. If you actually do have a definition of True Scotsman that you can point to and won’t change, then you’re not going to fall under this fallacy.
Okay, I’m confused here. Do you believe there are potentially correct and incorrect answers to the question “what does the Bible say that Jesus taught while alive?”
IMO, most Christians unconsciously concentrate on the passages that match their preconceptions, and ignore or explain away the rest. This behavior is ridiculously easy to notice in others, and equally difficult to notice in oneself.
For example, I expect you to ignore or explain away Matthew 10:34: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
I expect you find Mark 11:12-14 rather bewildering: “On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.””
I still think Luke 14:26 has a moderately good explanation behind it, but there’s also a good chance that this is a verse I’m still explaining away, even though I’m not a Christian any more and don’t need to: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
The bible was authored by different individuals over the course of time. That’s pretty well established. Those individuals had different motives and goals. IMO, this causes there to actually be competing strains of thought in the bible. People pick out the strains of thought that speak to their preconceived notions. For one last example, I expect you’ll explain James in light of Ephesians, arguing that grace is the main theme. But I think it’s equally valid for someone to explain Ephesians in light of James, arguing that changed behavior is the main theme. These are both valid approaches, in my mind, because contrary to the expectations of Christians (who believe that deep down, James and Ephesians must be saying the same thing), James and Ephesians are actually opposing view points.
Finally, I’ll answer your question: probably not. Not every collection of words has an objective meaning. Restricting yourself to the gospels helps a lot, but I still think they are ambiguous enough to support multiple interpretations.
I suspect that nearly all Christians will agree with your definition (excepting Mormons and JW’s, but I assume you added “divinity” in there to intentionally exclude them)
That isn’t a tacked on addition. It’s the core principle of the entire faith!
The way I see it, there appear to be enough contradictions and ambiguities in the Bible and associated fan work that it’s possible to use it to justify almost anything. (Including slavery.) So it’s hard to tell a priori what’s un-Christian and what isn’t.
Against a Biblical literalist, this would probably be a pretty good attack—if you think a plausible implication of a single verse in the Bible, taken out of context, is an absolute moral justification for a proposed action, then, yes, you can justify pretty much any behavior.
However, this does not seem to be the thrust of AspiringKnitter’s point, nor, even if it were, should we be content to argue against such a rhetorically weak position.
Rather, I think AspiringKnitter is arguing that certain emotions, attitudes, dispositions, etc. are repeated often enough and forcefully enough in the Bible so as to carve out an identifiable cluster in thing-space. A kind, gentle, equalitarian pacifist is (among other things) acting more consistently with the teachings of the literary character of Jesus than a judgmental, aggressive, elitist warrior. Assessing whether someone is acting consistently with the literary character of Jesus’s teachings is an inherently subjective enterprise, but that doesn’t mean that all opinions on the subject are equally valid—there is some content there.
Rather, I think AspiringKnitter is arguing that certain emotions, attitudes, dispositions, etc. are repeated often enough and forcefully enough in the Bible so as to carve out an identifiable cluster in thing-space. A kind, gentle, equalitarian pacifist is (among other things) acting more consistently with the teachings of the literary character of Jesus than a judgmental, aggressive, elitist warrior. Assessing whether someone is acting consistently with the literary character of Jesus’s teachings is an inherently subjective enterprise, but that doesn’t mean that all opinions on the subject are equally valid—there is some content there.
You have a good point there.
Then again, there are plenty of times that Jesus says things to the effect of “Repent sinners, because the end is coming, and God and I are gonna kick your ass if you don’t!”
That is Jesus in half his moods speaking that way. But there’s another Jesus in there. There’s a Jesus who’s just paradoxical and difficult to interpret, a Jesus who tells people to hate their parents. And then there is the Jesus — while he may not be as plausible given how we want to think about Jesus — but he’s there in scripture, coming back amid a host of angels, destined to deal out justice to the sinners of the world. That is the Jesus that fully half of the American electorate is most enamored of at this moment.
The way I see it, there appear to be enough contradictions and ambiguities in the Bible and associated fan work that it’s possible to use it to justify almost anything.
Sacrifice other people’s wives to the devil. That’s almost certainly out.
(Including slavery.)
Yes, that’s a significant moral absurdity to us but no a big deal to the cultures who created the religion or to the texts themselves. (Fairly ambivalent—mostly just supports following whatever is the status quo on the subject.)
So it’s hard to tell a priori what’s un-Christian and what isn’t.
No, it’s really not. There is plenty of grey but there are a whole lot of clear cut rules too. Murdering. Stealing. Grabbing guys by the testicles when they are fighting. All sorts of things.
Your comment seems to be about a general trend and doesn’t rest on slavery itself, correct?
Because if not, I just want to point out that the Bible never says “slavery is good”. It regulates it, ensuring minimal rights for slaves, and assumes it will happen, which is kind of like the rationale behind legalizing drugs. Slaves are commanded in the New Testament to obey their masters, which those telling them to do so explain as being so that the faith doesn’t get a bad reputation. The only time anyone’s told to practice slavery is as punishment for a crime, which is surely no worse than incarceration. At least you’re getting some extra work done.
I assume this doesn’t change your mind because you have other examples in mind?
One thing that struck me about the Bible when I first read it was that Jesus never flat-out said, “look guys, owning people is wrong, don’t do it”. Instead, he (as you pointed out) treats slavery as a basic fact of life, sort of like breathing or language or agriculture. There are a lot of parables in the New Testament which use slavery as a plot device, or as an analogy to illustrate a point, but none that imagine a world without it.
Contrast this to the modern world we live in. To most of us, slavery is almost unthinkable, and we condemn it whenever we see it. As imperfect as we are, we’ve come a long way in the past 2000 years—all of us, even Christians. That’s something to be proud of, IMO.
… I just want to point out that the Bible never says “slavery is good”. It regulates it, ensuring minimal rights for slaves, and assumes it will happen, which is kind of like the rationale behind legalizing drugs.
Hrm, I support legalizing-and-regulating (at least some) drugs and am not in favor of legalizing-and-regulating slavery. I just thought about it for 5 minutes and I still really don’t think they are analogous.
Deciding factor: sane, controlled drug use does not harm anyone (with the possible exception of the user, but they do so willingly). “sane, controlled” slavery would still harm someone against their will (with the exception of voluntary BDSM type relationships, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what we’re talking about).
Haha, I did think of that before making my last comment :)
Answer: in cases where said people are likely to harm others, yes. IMO, society gains more utilons from incarcerating them than the individuals lose from being incarcerated. Otherwise, I’d much rather see more constructive forms of punishment.
OK. So, consider a proposal to force prisoners to perform involuntary labor, in such a way that society gains more utilons from that labor than the individuals lose from being forced to perform it.
Would you support that proposal? Would you label that proposal “slavery”? If not (to either or both), why not?
It would probably depend on the specific proposal. I’d lean more towards “no” the more involuntary and demeaning the task. (I’m not certain my values are consistent here; I haven’t put huge amounts of thought into it.)
Would you label that proposal “slavery”?
Not in the sense I thought we were talking about, which (at least in my mind) included the concept of one individual “owning” another. In a more general sense, I guess yes.
Well, for my own part I would consider a system of involuntary forced labor as good an example of slavery as I can think of… to be told “yes, you have to work at what I tell you to work at, and you have no choice in the matter, but at least I don’t own you” would be bewildering.
That said, I don’t care about the semantics very much. But if the deciding factor in your opposition to legalizing and regulating slavery is that slavery harms someone against their will, then it seems strange to me that who owns whom is relevant here. Is ownership in and of itself a form of harm?
Tabooing “slavery”: “You committed crimes and society has deemed that you will perform task X for Y years as a repayment” seems significantly different (to me) from “You were kidnapped from country Z, sold to plantation owner W and must perform task X for the rest of your life”. I can see arguments for and against the former, but the latter is just plain evil.
This actually understates the degree of difference. Chattel slavery isn’t simply about involuntary labor. It also involves, for example, lacking the autonomy to marry without the consent of one’s master, the arbitrary separation of families and the selling of slaves’ children, etc.
Sure, I agree. But unless the latter is what’s being referred to Biblically, we do seem to have shifted the topic of conversation somewhere along the line.
It’s been awhile since I read it last, but IIRC, the laws regarding slavery in the OT cover individuals captured in a war as well as those sold into slavery to pay a debt.
The only time anyone’s told to practice slavery is as punishment for a crime, which is surely no worse than incarceration. At least you’re getting some extra work done.
In fact, often taking slaves is outright sinful. (Because you’re supposed to genocide them instead! :P)
Well, not the Pope, certainly. He’s a Catholic. But I thought a workable definition of “Christian” was “person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ and tries to follow his teachings”, in which case we have a pretty objective test.
Is this a “Catholics aren’t Christian” thing, or just drawing attention to the point that not all Christians are Catholic?
Alright. I’ve encountered some people of the former opinion, and while it really didn’t square with the impression you’ve given thusfar I would have been interested to see your reasoning if you’d in fact held that view.
Hmm, so apparently, looking up religious conversion testimonies on the intertubes is more difficult than I thought, because all the top search results lead to sites that basically say, “here’s why religion X is wrong and my own religion Y is the best thing since sliced bread”. That said, here’s a random compilation of Chrtistianity-to-Islam conversion testimonials. You can also check out the daily “Why am I an Atheist” feature on Pharyngula, but be advised that this site is quite a bit more angry than Less Wrong, so the posts may not be representative.
BTW, I’m not endorsing any of these testimonials, I’m just pointing out that they do exist.
NO. That takes a BIG NO. Severity of mental illness is NOT correlated with violence
Well, I brought that up because I know of at least one mental illness-related violent incident in my own extended family. That said, you are probably right in saying that schizophrenia and violence are not strongly correlated. However, note that violence against others was just one of the negative effects I’d brought up; existential risk to one’s self was another.
I think they key disagreement we’re having is along the following lines: is it better to believe in something that’s true, or in something that’s probably false, but has a positive effect on you as a person ? I believe that the second choice will actually result in a lower utility. Am I correct in thinking that you disagree ? If so, I can elaborate on my position.
Okay, so I mean, if you think you only want to fulfill your own selfish desires...
I don’t think there are many people (outside of upper management, maybe, heh), of any religious denomination or lack thereof, who wake up every morning and say to themselves, “man, I really want to fulfill some selfish desires today, and other people can go suck it”. Though, in a trivial sense, I suppose that one can interpret wanting to be nice to people as a selfish desire, as well...
Well, not the Pope, certainly. He’s a Catholic.
You keep asserting things like this, but to an atheist, or an adherent of any faith other than yours, these assertions are pretty close to null statements—unless you can back them up with some evidence that is independent of faith.
But I thought a workable definition of “Christian” was “person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ and tries to follow his teachings”
Every single person (plus or minus epsilon) who calls oneself “Christian” claims to “follow Jesus’s teachings”; but all Christians disagree on what “following Jesus’s teachings” actually means, so your test is not objective. All those Christians who want to persecute gay people, ban abortion, teach Creationism in schools, or even merely follow the Pope and venerate Mary—all of them believe that they are doing what Jesus would’ve wanted them to do, and they can quote Bible verses to prove it.
Compare it with a relevant quote from the Bible, which has been placed in different places in different versions...
Some Christians claim that this story is a later addition to the Bible and therefore non-authoritative. I should also mention that both YHVH and, to a lesser extent, Jesus, did some pretty intolerant things; such as committing wholesale genocide, whipping people, condemning people, authorizing slavery, etc. The Bible is quite a large book...
That said, here’s a random compilation of Chrtistianity-to-Islam conversion testimonials. You can also check out the daily “Why am I an Atheist” feature on Pharyngula, but be advised that this site is quite a bit more angry than Less Wrong, so the posts may not be representative.
Thank you.
Well, I brought that up because I know of at least one mental illness-related violent incident in my own extended family.
I’m sorry.
I think they key disagreement we’re having is along the following lines: is it better to believe in something that’s true, or in something that’s probably false, but has a positive effect on you as a person ?
No, I don’t think that’s true, because it’s better to believe what’s true.
I believe that the second choice will actually result in a lower utility.
So do I, because of the utility I assign to being right.
Am I correct in thinking that you disagree ?
No.
Every single person (plus or minus epsilon) who calls oneself “Christian” claims to “follow Jesus’s teachings”; but all Christians disagree on what “following Jesus’s teachings” actually means, so your test is not objective. All those Christians who want to persecute gay people, ban abortion, teach Creationism in schools, or even merely follow the Pope and venerate Mary—all of them believe that they are doing what Jesus would’ve wanted them to do, and they can quote Bible verses to prove it.
Suppose, hypothetically, that current LessWrong trends of adding rituals and treating EY as to some extent above others continue. And then suppose that decades or centuries down the line, we haven’t got transhumanism, but we HAVE got LessWrongians who now argue about what EY really meant. And some of them disagree with each other, and others outside their community just raise their eyebrows and think man, LessWrongians are such a weird cult. Would it be correct, at least, to say that there’s a correct answer to the question “who is following Eliezer Yudkowsky’s teachings?” That there’s a yes or no answer to the question “did EY advocate prisons just because he failed to speak out against them?” Or to the question “would he have disapproved of people being irrational?” If not, I’ll admit you’re being self-consistent, at least.
Some Christians claim that this story is a later addition to the Bible and therefore non-authoritative.
And that claim should be settled by studying the relevant history.
EDIT: oh, and I forgot to mention that one doesn’t have to actually think “I want to go around fulfilling my selfish desires” so much as just have a utility function that values only one’s own comfort and not other people’s.
No, I don’t think that’s true, because it’s better to believe what’s true.
This statement appears to contradict your earlier statements that a). It’s better to live with the perception-altering symptoms of schizophrenia, than to replace those symptoms with depression and other side-effects, and b). You determine the nature of every “gut feeling” (i.e., whether it is divine or internal) by using multiple criteria, one of which is, “would I be better off as a person if this feeling was, in fact, divine”.
Suppose, hypothetically, that current LessWrong trends of adding rituals and treating EY as to some extent above others continue.
I hope not, I think people are engaging in more than enough EY-worship as it is, but that’s beside the point...
And then suppose that decades or centuries down the line, we haven’t got transhumanism, but we HAVE got LessWrongians who now argue about what EY really meant… Would it be correct, at least, to say that there’s a correct answer to the question “who is following Eliezer Yudkowsky’s teachings?”
Since we know today that EY actually existed, and what he talked about, then yes. However, this won’t be terribly relevant in the distant future, for several reasons:
Even though everyone would have an answer to this question, it is far from guaranteed that more than zero answers would be correct, because it’s entirely possible that no Yudkowskian sect would have the right answer.
Our descendants likely won’t have access to EY’s original texts, but to Swahili translations from garbled Chinese transcriptions, or something; it’s possible that the translations would reflect the translators’ preferences more than EY’s original intent. In this case, EY’s original teachings would be rendered effectively inaccessible, and thus the question would become unanswerable.
Unlike us here in the past, our future descendants won’t have any direct evidence of EY’s existence. They may have so little evidence, in fact, that they may be entirely justified in concluding that EY was a fictional character, like James Bond or Harry Potter. I’m not sure if fictional characters can have “teachings” or not.
That there’s a yes or no answer to the question “did EY advocate prisons just because he failed to speak out against them?”
This question is not analogous, because, unlike the characters on the OT and NT, EY does not make a habit of frequently using prisons as the basis for his parables, nor does EY claim to be any kind of a moral authority. That said, if EY did say these things, and if prisons were found to be extremely immoral in the future—then our descendants would be entirely justified in saying that EY’s morality was far inferior to their own.
And that claim should be settled by studying the relevant history.
I doubt whether there exist any reasonably fresh first-hand accounts of Jesus’s daily life (assuming, of course, that Jesus existed at all). If such accounts did exist, they did not survive the millennia that passed since then. Thus, it would be very difficult to determine what Jesus did and did not do—especially given the fact that we don’t have enough secular evidence to even conclude that he existed with any kind of certainty.
This statement appears to contradict your earlier statements that
a). It’s better to live with the perception-altering symptoms of schizophrenia, than to replace those symptoms with depression and other side-effects,
I want to say I don’t know why you think I made that statement, but I do know, and it’s because you don’t understand what I said. I said that given that those drugs fix the psychosis less than half the time, that almost ten percent of cases spontaneously recover anyway, that the entire rest of the utility function might take overwhelming amounts of disutility from side-effects including permanent disfiguring tics, a type of unfixable restlessness that isn’t helped by fidgeting and usually causes great suffering, greater risk of diseases, lack of caring about anything, mental fog (which will definitely impair your ability to find the truth), and psychosis (not even kidding, that’s one of the side-effects of antipsychotics), and given that it can lead to a curtailing of one’s civil liberties to be diagnosed, it might not be worth it. Look, there’s this moral theory called utilitarianism where you can have one bad thing happen and still think it’s worth it because the alternative is worse, and it doesn’t just have to work for morals. It works for anything; you can’t just say “X is bad, fix X at all cost”. You have to be sure it’s not actually the best state of affairs first. Something can be both appalling and the best possible choice, and my utility function isn’t as simple as you seem to think it is. I think there are things of value besides just having perfectly clear perception.
Our descendants likely won’t have access to EY’s original texts, but to Swahili translations from garbled Chinese transcriptions, or something;
This is the internet. Nothing anyone says on the internet is ever going away, even if some of us really wish it could. /nitpick
b). You determine the nature of every “gut feeling” (i.e., whether it is divine or internal) by using multiple criteria, one of which is, “would I be better off as a person if this feeling was, in fact, divine”.
I really want to throw up my hands here and say “but I’ve explained this MULTIPLE TIMES, you are BEING AN IDIOT” but I remember the illusion of transparency. And that you haven’t understood. And that you didn’t make a deliberate decision to annoy me. But I’m still annoyed. I STILL want to call you an idiot, even though I know I haven’t phrased something correctly and I should explain again. That doesn’t even sound like what I believe or what I (thought I) said. (Maybe that’s how it came out. Ugh.)
Why is communication so difficult? Why doesn’t knowing that someone’s not doing it on purpose matter? It’s the sort of thing that you’d think would actually affect my feelings.
This is the internet. Nothing anyone says on the internet is ever going away, even if some of us really wish it could. /nitpick
You would be surprised… If it weren’t for the internet archive much information would have already been lost. Some modern websites are starting to use web design techniques (ajax-loaded content) that break such archive services.
I really want to throw up my hands here and say “but I’ve explained this MULTIPLE TIMES, you are BEING AN IDIOT” but I remember the illusion of transparency.
One option would be to reply with a pointer to your previous comment.
I see you’ve used the link syntax within a comment—this web site supports permalinks to comments as well.
At least you wouldn’t be forced to repeat yourself.
But since I obviously explained it wrong, what good does it do to remind him of where I explained it? I’ve used the wrong words, I need to find new ones. Ugh.
Best wishes. Was your previous explanation earlier in your interchange with Bugmaster?
If so, I agree that Bugmaster would have read your explanation, and that pointing to it
wouldn’t help (I sympathize). If, however, your previous explanation was in response to
another lesswrongian, it is possible that Bugmaster missed it, in which case a pointer might
help. I’ve been following your comments, but I’m sure I’ve missed some of them.
(I just came back from vacation, sorry for the late reply, and happy New Year ! Also, Merry Christmas if you are so inclined :-) )
Firstly, I operate by Crocker’s Rules, so you can call me anything you want and I won’t mind.
It works for anything; you can’t just say “X is bad, fix X at all cost”. You have to be sure it’s not actually the best state of affairs first.
I agree with you completely regarding utilitarianism (although in this case we’re not talking about the moral theory, just the approach in general). All I was saying is that IMO the utility one places on believing things that are likely to be actually true should, IMO, be extremely high—and possibly higher than the utility you assign to this feature. But “extremely high” does not mean “infinite”, of course, and it’s entirely possible that, in some cases, the disutility from all the side-effects will not be worth the utility gain—especially if the side-effects are preventing you from believing true things anyway (f.ex. “mental fog”, psychosis, depression, etc.).
That said, if I personally was seeing visions or hearing voices, I would be willing (assuming I remained reasonably rational, of course) to risk a very large disutility even for a less than 50% chance of fixing the problem. If I can’t trust my senses (or, indeed, my thoughts), then my ability to correctly evaluate my utility is greatly diminished. I could be thinking that everything is just great, while in reality I was hurting myself or others, and I’d be none the wiser. Of course, I could also be just great in reality, as well; but given the way this universe works, this is unlikely.
This is the internet. Nothing anyone says on the internet is ever going away, even if some of us really wish it could.
Data on the Internet is less permanent than many people think, IMO, but this is probably beside the point; I was making an analogy to the Bible, which was written in the days before the Internet, but (sadly) after the days of giant stone steles. Besides, the way things are going, it’s not out of the question that future versions of the Internet would all be written in Chinese...
Why is communication so difficult? Why doesn’t knowing that someone’s not doing it on purpose matter?
I think this is because you possess religious faith, which I have never experienced, and thus I am unable to evaluate what you say in the same frame of reference. Or it could be because I’m just obtuse. Or a bit of both.
Besides, the way things are going, it’s not out of the question that future versions of the Internet would all be written in Chinese...
I don’t think so. The popularity of the English language has gained momentum such that even if its original causes (the economic status of the US) ceased, it would go on for quite a while. Chinese hasn’t. See http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm (It was written a decade and a half ago, but I don’t think the situation is significantly qualitatively different for English and Chinese in ways which couldn’t have been predicted back then.) I think English is going to remain the main international language for at least 30 more years, unless some major catastrophe occurs (where by major I mean ‘killing at least 5% of the world human population’).
You keep asserting things like this, but to an atheist, or an adherent of any faith other than yours, these assertions are pretty close to null statements—unless you can back them up with some evidence that is independent of faith.
There is a bit of ambiguity here, but I asked after it and apparently the more strident interpretation was not intended. The position that the Pope doesn’t determine who is Christian because the Pope is Catholic and therefore doesn’t speak with authority regarding those Christians who are not Catholic seems uncontroversial, internally consistent, and not privileging any particular view.
“Better person” here means “person who maximizes average utility better”.
Understood, though I was confused for a moment there. When other people say “better person”, they usually mean something like “a person who is more helpful and kinder to others”, not merely “a happier person”, though obviously those categories do overlap.
I think that by “maximizes average utility” AspiringKnitter meant utility averaged over every human being—so helpfulness and kindness to others is by necessity included.
Since a utility function is only defined up to affine transformations with positive scale factor, what does it mean to sum several utility functions together? (Sure someone has already thought about that, but I can’t think of anything sensible.)
I haven’t studied schizophrenia in any detail, but wouldn’t a person suffering from it also have a skewed subjective perception of what “being miserable” is ?
Misery is a subjective experience. The schizophrenic patients I work with describe feeling a lot of distress because of their symptoms, and their voices usually tell them frightening things. So I would expect a person hearing voices due to psychosis to be more distressed than someone hearing God.
That said, I was less happy when I believed in God because I felt constantly that I had unmet obligations to him.
If the goal is to arrive at the truth no matter one’s background or extenuating circumstances, I don’t think this list quite does the trick. You want a list of steps such that, if a Muslim generated a list using the same cognitive algorithm, it would lead them to the same conclusion your list will lead you to.
From this perspective, #2 is extremely problematic; it assumes the thing you’re trying to establish from the spiritual experience (the veracity of Christianity). If a muslim wrote this step, it’d look totally different, as it would for any religion. (You do hint at this, props for that.) This step will only get you to the truth if you start out already having the truth.
#7 is problematic from a different perspective; well-being and truth-knowledge are not connected on a fundamental level, most noticeably when people around you don’t know the same things you know. For reference, see Gallileo.
Also, my own thought: if we both agree that your brain can generate surprisingly coherent stuff while dreaming, then it seems reasonable to suppose the brain has machinery capable of the process. So my own null hypothesis is that that machinery can get triggered in ways which produce the content of spiritual experiences.
God has been known to speak to people through dreams, visions and gut feelings.
In addition to your discussion with APMason:
When you have a gut feeling, how do you know whether this is (most likely) a regular gut feeling, or whether this is (most likely) God speaking to you ? Gut feelings are different from visions (and possibly dreams), since even perfectly sane and healthy people have them all the time.
*There’s a joke I can’t find about some Talmudic scholars who are arguing. They ask God, a voice booms out from the heavens which one is right, and the others fail to update.
I can’t find the source right now, but AFAIK this isn’t merely a joke, but a parable from somewhere in the Talmud. One of the rabbis wants to build an oven in a way that’s proscribed by the Law (because it’d be more convenient for some engineering reason that I forget), and the other rabbis are citing the Law at him to explain why this is wrong. The point of the parable is that the Law is paramount; not even God has the power to break it (to say nothing of mere mortal rabbis). The theme of rules and laws being ironclad is a trope of Judaism that does not, AFAIK, exist in Christianity.
In the Talmudic story, the voice of God makes a claim about the proper interpretation of the Law, but it is dismissed because the interpretation of the Law lies in the domain of Men, where it is bound by certain peculiar hermeneutics. The point is that Halacha does not flow from a single divine authority, but is produced by a legal tradition.
And that’s not what I’m thinking of. It’s probably a joke about the parable, though. But I distinctly recall it NOT having a moral and being on the internet on a site of Jewish jokes.
Bugmaster: Well, go with your gut either way, since it’s probably right.
It could be something really surprising to you that you don’t think makes sense or is true, just as one example. Of course, if not, I can’t think of a good way off the top of my head.
Well, go with your gut either way, since it’s probably right.
Hmm, are you saying that going with your gut is most often the right choice ? Perhaps your gut is smarter than mine, since I can recall many examples from my own life when trusting my intuitions turned out to be a bad idea. Research likewise shows that human intuition often produces wrong answers to important questions; what we call “critical thinking” today is largely a collection of techniques that help people overcome their intuitive biases. Nowadays, whenever I get a gut feeling about something, I try to make the effort to double-check it in a more systematic fashion, just to make sure (excluding exceptional situations such as “I feel like there might be a tiger in that bush”, of course).
I’m claiming that going with your gut instinct usually produces good results, and when time is limited produces the best results available unless there’s a very simple bias involved and an equally simple correction to fix it.
Sometimes I feel my gut is smarter than my explicit reasoning, as I sometimes, when I have to make a decision in a very limited time, I make a choice which, five seconds later, I can’t fully make sense of, but on further reflection I realize it was indeed the most reasonable possible choice after all. (There might some kind of bias I fail to fully correct for, though.)
I apologize; earlier I deliberately glossed over a complicated thought process just to give the conclusion that maybe you could know, as opposed to explaining in full.
God has been known to speak to people through dreams, visions and gut feelings. That doesn’t mean God always answers when I ask questions, which probably has something to do with the weakness of my faith. You could ask and you could try to listen, and if God is willing to answer, and if you don’t ignore obvious evidence due to your own biases*, you could get an answer. But God has for whatever reason chosen to be rather taciturn (I can only think of one person I know who’s been sent a vision from God), so you also might not, and God might speak to one person about it but not everyone, leaving others to wonder if they can trust people’s claims, or to study the Bible and other relevant information to try to figure it out for themselves. And then there are people who just get stuff wrong and won’t listen, but insist they’re right, and insist God agrees with them, confusing anyone God hasn’t spoken to. Hence, if you receive an answer and listen (something that’s happened to me, but not nearly every time I ask a question—at least, not unless we count finding the answer after asking through running into it in a book or something), you’ll know, but there’s also a possibility of just not finding out.
*There’s a joke I can’t find about some Talmudic scholars who are arguing. They ask God, a voice booms out from the heavens which one is right, and the others fail to update.
But schizophrenics have been known to experience those things too. How do you tell the difference—even if you’re the one it’s happening to?
I had to confront that one. Upvoted for being an objection a reasonable person should make.
Be familiar with how mental illnesses and other disorders that can affect thinking actually present. (Not just the DSM. Read what people with those conditions say about them.)
Be familiar with what messages from God are supposed to be like. (From Old Testament examples or Paul’s heuristic. I suppose it’s also reasonable to ascertain whether or not they fit the pattern for some other religion.)
Essentially, look at what your experiences best fit. That can be hard. But if your “visions” are highly disturbing and you become paranoid about your neighbors trying to kill you, it’s more likely schizophrenia than divine inspiration. This applies to other things as well.
Does it actually make sense? Is it a message saying something, and then another one of the same sort, proclaiming the opposite, so that to believe one requires disbelieving the other?
Is there anything you can do to increase the probability that you’re mentally healthy? Is your thyroid okay? How are your adrenals? Either could get sick in a way that mimics a mood disorder. Can you also consider whether your lifestyle’s not conducive to mental health? Sleep problems? Poor nutrition?
Run it by other people who know you well and would be people you would trust to know if you were mentally ill.
No certainties. Just ways to be a little more sure. And that leads into the next one.
Pick the most likely interpretation and go with it and see if your quality of life improves. See if you’re becoming a better person.
“The angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt.”
I work in a psych hospital, and the delusional patients there uniformly believe that their delusions make sense.
This is the most likely to work. The delusional people I know are aware that other people disagree with their delusions. Relatedly, there is great disagreement on the topic of religion.
Good point. Of course, this one does make a testable prediction, and as opposed to what might be more characteristic of a mental illness, the angel tells him there’s trouble, he avoids it and we have no further evidence of his getting any more such messages. That at least makes schizophrenia a much less likely explanation than just having a weird dream, so that’s what to try ruling out.
I have to admit that I’m not familiar with Paul’s heuristic—what is it ?
As for the Old Testament, God gives out some pretty frightening messages in there, from “sacrifice your son to me” to “wipe out every man, woman, and child who lives in this general area”. I am reasonably sure you wouldn’t listen to a message like that, but why wouldn’t you ?
I have heard this sentiment from other theists, but I still understand it rather poorly, I’m ashamed to admit… maybe it’s because I’ve never been religious, and thus I’m missing some context.
So, what do you mean by “a better person”; how do you judge what is “better” ? In addition, let’s imagine that you discovered that believing in, say, Buddhism made you an even better person. Would you listen to messages that appear to be Buddhist, and discard those that appear to be Christian but contradict Buddhism—even though you’re pretty sure that Christianity is right and Buddhism is wrong ?
I think I might be too tired to give this the response it deserves. If this post isn’t a good enough answer, ask me again in the morning.
That you can tell whether a spirit is good or evil by whether or not it says Jesus is Lord.
Well, right here I mean that if you’ve narrowed it down to either schizophrenia or Christianity is true and God is speaking to you, if it’s the former, untreated, you expect to feel more miserable. If it’s the latter, by embracing God, you expect it’ll make your quality of life improve. “Better person” here means “person who maximizes average utility better”.
Oh, I see, and the idea here is that the evil spirit would not be able to actually say “Jesus is Lord” without self-destructing, right ? Thanks, I get it now; but wouldn’t this heuristic merely help you to determine whether the message is coming from a good spirit or an evil one, not whether the message is coming from a spirit or from inside your own head ?
I haven’t studied schizophrenia in any detail, but wouldn’t a person suffering from it also have a skewed subjective perception of what “being miserable” is ?
Some atheists claim that their life was greatly improved after their deconversion from Christianity, and some former Christians report the same thing after converting to Islam. Does this mean that the Christian God didn’t really talk to them while they were religious, after all—or am I overanalyzing your last bullet point ?
Understood, though I was confused for a moment there. When other people say “better person”, they usually mean something like “a person who is more helpful and kinder to others”, not merely “a happier person”, though obviously those categories do overlap.
I just lost my comment by hitting the wrong button. Not being too tired today, though, here’s what I think in new words:
Yes. That’s why we have to look into all sorts of possibilities.
Speaking here only as a layperson who’s done a lot of research, I can’t think of any indication of that. Rather, they tend to be pretty miserable if their psychosis is out of control (with occasional exceptions). One person’s biography that I read recounts having it mistaken for depression at first, and believing that herself since it fit. That said, conventional approaches to treating schizophrenia don’t help much/any with half of it, the half that most impairs quality of life. (Not that psychosis doesn’t, but as a quick explanation, they also suffer from the “negative symptoms” which include stuff like apathy, poor grooming and stuff. The “positive symptoms” are stuff like hearing voices and being delusional. In the rare* cases where medication works, it only treats positive symptoms and usually exacerbates negative symptoms. (Just run down a list of side-effects and a list of negative symptoms. It helps if you know jargon.) Hence, poor quality of life.) So it’s also possible that receiving treatment for a mental illness you actually have would fail to increase quality of life. Add in abuses by the system and it could even decrease it, so this is definitely a problem.
Aris understood correctly.
*About a third of schizophrenics are helped by medication. Not rare, certainly, but that’s less than half. Guidelines for treating schizophrenia are irrational. I will elaborate if asked, with the caveat that it’s irrelevant and I’m not a doctor.
And I left stuff out here that was in the first.
Short version: unsurprising because of things like this. People can identify as Christian while being confused about what that means.
Surprising. My model takes a hit here. Do you have links to firsthand accounts of this?
I’m surprised by your surprise.
I generally expect that people who make an effort to be X will subsequently report that being X improves their life, whether we’re talking about “convert to Christianity” or “convert to Islam” or “deconvert from Christianity” or “deconvert from Islam.”
Interesting—the flip side is “the grass is always greener.” I am not at all surprised that other effects dominate sometimes, or even a good deal of the time, however.
Can you clarify? Is it your claim that these “confused” Christians are the only ones who experience improved lives upon deconversion? Or did you mean something else?
I’m saying people can believe that they are Christians, go to church, pray, believe in the existence of God and still be wrong about fundamental points of doctrine like “I require mercy, not sacrifice” or the two most important commands, leading to people who think being Christian means they should hate certain people. There are also people who conflate tradition and divine command, leading to groups that believe being Christian means following specific rules which are impractical in modern culture and not beneficial. I expect anyone like that to have an improved quality of life after they stop hating people and doing pointless things. I expect a quality of life even better than that if they stop doing the bad stuff but really study the Bible and be good people, with the caveat that quality of life for those people could be lowered by persecution in some times and places. (They could also end up persecuted for rejecting it entirely in other times and places. Or even the same ones.)
Basically, yeah, only if they’ve done something wrong in their interpretation of Scripture will they like being atheists better than being Christians.
My brain is interpreting that as “well, TRUE Christians wouldn’t be happier/better if they deconverted.” How is this not “No True Scotsman”?
Would you say you are some variety of Calvinist? I’m guessing not, since you don’t sound quite emphatic enough on this point. (For the Calvinist, it’s point of doctrine that no one can cease being a Christian—they must not have been elect in the first place. I expect you already know this, I’m saying it for the benefit of any following the conversation who are lucky enough to not have heard of Calvinism. Also, lots of fundamentalist leaning groups (e.g., Baptists) have a “once saved always saved” doctrine.)
I hope I’m not coming off confrontational; I had someone IRL tell me I must never have been a real christian not too long ago, and I found it very annoying—so I may be being a bit overly sensitive.
Explained here. Tell me if that’s not clear.
Um… not exactly?
I was familiar with the concept, but not its name.
You’re not, but I live by Crocker’s Rules anyway.
Could you elaborate on this point a bit ? As far as I understand, at least some of the positive symptoms may pose significant existential risks to the patient (and possibly those around him, depending on severity). For example, a person may see a car coming straight at him, and desperately try to dodge it, when in reality there’s no car. Or a person may fail to notice a car that actually exists. Or, in extreme cases, the person may believe that his neighbour is trying to kill him, take preemptive action, and murder an innocent. If I had symptoms like that, I personally would rather live with the negatives for the rest of my life, rather than living with the vastly increased risk that I might accidentally kill myself or harm others—even knowing that I might feel subjectively happier until that happens.
Ok, that makes sense: by “becoming a better person”, you don’t just mean “a happier person”, but also “a person who’s more helpful and nicer to others”; and you choose to believe things that make you such a person.
I have to admit, this mode of thought is rather alien to me, and thus I have a tough time understanding it. To me, this sounds perilously close to wishful thinking. To use an exaggerated example, I would definitely feel happier if I knew that I had a million dollars in the bank. Having a million dollars would also empower me to be a better person, since I could donate at least some of it to charity, or invest it in a school, etc. However, I am not going to go ahead and believe that I have a million dollars, because… well… I don’t.
In addition, there’s a question of what one sees as being “better”. As we’d talked about earlier, at least some theists do honestly believe that persecuting gay people and forcing women to wear burqas is a good thing to do (and a moral imperative). Thus, they will (presumably) interpret any gut feelings that prompt them to enforce the burqa ordinances even harder as being good and therefore godly and true. You (and I), however, would do just the opposite. So, we both use the same method but arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions; doesn’t this mean that the method may be flawed ?
My main objection to this line of reasoning is that it involves the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Who is to say (other than the Pope, perhaps) what being a Christian “really means” ? The more conservative Christians believe that feminism is a sin, whereas you do not; but how would you convince an impartial observer that you are right and they are wrong ? You could say, “clearly such attitudes harm women, and we shouldn’t be hurting people”, but they’d just retort with, “yes, and incarcerating criminals harms the criminals to, but it must be done for the greater good, because that’s what God wants; He told me so”.
In addition, it is not the case that all people who leave Christianity (be it for another religion, or for no religion at all) come from such extreme sects as the one you linked to. For example, Julia Sweeny (*), a prominent atheist, came from a relatively moderate background, IIRC. More on this below:
I don’t have any specific links right now (I will try to find some later), but apparently there is a whole website dedicated to the subject. Wikipedia also has a list. I personally know at least two people who converted from relatively moderate versions of Christianity to Wicca and Neo-Paganism, and report being much happier as the result, though obviously this is just anecdotal information and not hard data. In general, though, my impression was that religious conversions are relatively common, though I haven’t done any hard research on the topic. There’s an interesting-looking paper on the topic that I don’t have access to… maybe someone else here does ?
(*) I just happened to remember her name off the top of my head, because her comedy routine is really funny.
Yeah. You could feel unhappy a lot more if you take the pills usually prescribed to schizophrenics because side-effects of those pills include mental fog and weight gain. You could also be a less helpful person to others because you would be less able to do thinks if you’re on a high enough dose to “zombify” you. Also, Erving Goffman’s work shows that situations where people are in an institution, as he defines the term, cause people to become stupider and less capable. (Kudos to the mental health system for trying to get people out of those places faster—most people who go in get out after a little while now, as opposed to the months it usually took when he was studying. However, the problems aren’t eliminated and his research is still applicable.) Hence, it could make you a worse and unhappier person to undergo treatment.
NO. That takes a BIG NO. Severity of mental illness is NOT correlated with violence. It’s correlated with self-harm, but not hurting other people.
Mental illness is correlated (no surprise here) with being abused and with substance abuse. Both of those are correlated with violence, leading to higher rates of violence among the mentally ill. Even when not corrected for, the rate isn’t that high and the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of it. But when those effects ARE corrected for, mental illness does not, by itself, cause violence.
At all. End of story. Axe-crazy villains in the movies are unrealistic and offensive portrayals of mental illness. /rant
This mode of thought is alien to me too, since I wasn’t advocating it. I’m confused about how you could come to that conclusion. I have been unclear, it seems.
(Seriously, what?)
Okay, so I mean, if you think you only want to fulfill your own selfish desires, and then become a Christian, and even though you don’t want to, decide it’s right to be nice to other people and spend time praying, and then after a while learn that it makes you really happy to be nice and happier than you’ve ever been before to pray. That’s what I meant.
Yes. It’s only to be used as an adjunct to thinking things through, not the end-all-be-all of your strategy for deciding what to do in life.
My argument isn’t against people who think feminism is sinful (would you like links to sane, godly people espousing the idea without being hateful?) but with the general tenor of the piece. See below.
Well, not the Pope, certainly. He’s a Catholic. But I thought a workable definition of “Christian” was “person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ and tries to follow his teachings”, in which case we have a pretty objective test. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors and be merciful. He repeatedly behaved politely toward women of poor morals, converting them with love and specifically avoiding condemnation. Hence, people who are hateful or condemn others are not following his teachings. If that was a mistake, that’s different, just like a rationalist could be overconfident—but to systematically do it and espouse the idea that you should be hateful clearly goes against what Jesus taught as recorded in the Bible. Here’s a quote from the link:
Compare it with a relevant quote from the Bible, which has been placed in different places in different versions, but the NIVUK (New International Version UK) puts it at the beginning of John 8:
So, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that, whether or not Christianity is correct and whether or not it’s right to lock people up for wearing miniskirts, that attitude is unChristian.
Thank you! I’ll look that over.
I seem to be collecting downvotes, so I’ll shut up about this shortly. But to me, anyway, this still sounds like No True Scotsman. I suspect that nearly all Christians will agree with your definition (excepting Mormons and JW’s, but I assume you added “divinity” in there to intentionally exclude them). However, I seriously doubt many of them will agree with your adjudication. Fundamentalists sincerely believe that the things they do are loving and following the teachings of Jesus. They think you are the one putting the emphasis on the wrong passages. I personally happen to think you probably are much more correct than they are; but the point is neither one of us gets to do the adjudication.
I think this is missing the point: they believe that, but they’re wrong. The fact that they’re wrong is what causes them distress. If you’d like, we can taboo the word “Christian” (or just end the conversation, as you suggest).
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I have never before had someone disagree with me on the grounds that I’m both morally superior to other people and a genius.
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I wouldn’t go disagreeing with him; I’d try performing a double-blind test of his athletic ability while wearing different pairs of socks. It just seems like the sort of thing that’s so simple to design and test that I don’t know if I could resist. I’d need three people and a stopwatch...
Don’t forget the spare pairs of socks!
Yes, thanks for reminding me. I’d also need pencil and paper.
And a nontrivial amount of time and attention.
I suspect that after the third or fifth such athlete, you’d develop the ability to resist, and simply have your opinion about his or her belief about socks, which you might or might not share depending on the circumstances.
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Uh-oh, that’s a bad sign. If someone on LessWrong thinks something like that, I’d better give it credence. But now I’m confused because I can’t think what has given you that idea. Ergo, there appears to be evidence that I’ve not only made a mistake in thinking, but made one unknowingly, and failed to realize afterward or even see that something was wrong.
So, this gives me two questions and I feel like an idiot for asking them, and if this site had heretofore been behaving like other internet sites this would be the point where the name-calling would start, but you guys seem more willing than average to help people straighten things out when they’re confused, so I’m actually going to bother asking:
What do you mean by “basic premise” and “can’t question” in this context? Do you mean that I can’t consider his nonexistence as a counterfactual? Or is there a logical impossibility in my conception of God that I’ve failed to notice?
Can I have specific quotes, or at least a general description, of when I’ve been evasive? Since I’m unaware of it, it’s probably a really bad thinking mistake, not actual evasiveness—that or I have a very inaccurate self-concept.
Actually, no possibility seems good here (in the sense that I should revise my estimate of my own intelligence and/or honesty and/or self-awareness down in almost every case), except that something I said yesterday while in need of more sleep came out really wrong. Or that someone else made a mistake, but given that I’ve gotten several downvotes (over seventeen, I think) in the last couple of hours, that’s either the work of someone determined to downvote everything I say or evidence that multiple people think I’m being stupid.
(You know, I do want to point out that the comment about testing his lucky socks was mostly a joke. I do assign a really low prior probability to the existence of lucky socks anywhere, in case someone voted me down for being an idiot instead of for missing the point and derailing the analogy. But testing it really is what I would do in real life if given the chance.)
This isn’t a general objection to my religion, is it? (I’m guessing no, but I want to make sure.)
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Not how I would have put that, but mostly ADBOC this. (I wouldn’t have called him a man, nor would I have singled out the sky as a place to put him. But yes, I do believe in a god who created everything and loves all, and ADBOC the bit about the 12-year-old—would you like to get into the Problem of Evil or just agree to disagree on the implied point even though that’s a Bayesian abomination? And agree with the last sentence.)
I’d ask you what would look different if I did, but I think you’ve answered this below.
You think I’m one of those people. Let me begin by saying that God’s existence is an empirical fact which one could either prove or disprove.
I worry about telling people why I converted because I fear ridicule or accusations of lying. However, I’ll tell you this much: I suddenly became capable of feeling two new sensations, neither of which I’d felt before and neither of which, so far as I know, has words in English to describe it. Sensation A felt like there was something on my skin, like dirt or mud, and something squeezing my heart, and was sometimes accompanied by a strange scent and almost always by feelings of distress. Sensation B never co-occurred with Sensation A. I could be feeling one, the other or neither, and could feel them to varying degrees. Sensation B felt relaxing, but also very happy and content and jubilant in a way and to a degree I’d never quite been before, and a little like there was a spring of water inside me, and like the water was gold-colored, and like this was all I really wanted forever, and a bit like love. After becoming able to feel these sensations, I felt them in certain situations and not in others. If one assumed that Sensation A was Bad and Sensation B was Good, then they were consistent with Christianity being true. Sometimes they didn’t surprise me. Sometimes they did—I could get the feeling that something was Bad even if I hadn’t thought so (had even been interested in doing it) and then later learn that Christian doctrine considered it Bad as well.
I do not think a universe without God would look the same. I can’t see any reason why a universe without God would behave as if it had an innate morality that seems, possibly, somewhat arbitrary. I would expect a universe without God to work just like I thought it did when I was an atheist. I would expect there to be nothing wrong (no signal saying Bad) with… well, anything, really. A universe without God has no innate morality. The only thing that could make morality would be human preference, which changes an awful lot. And I certainly wouldn’t expect to get a Good signal on the Bible but a Bad signal on other holy books.
So. That’s the better part of my evidence, such as it is.
This would be considerably more convincing if Christianity were a unified movement.
Suppose there existed only three religions in the world, all of which had a unified dogma and only one interpretation of it. Each of them had a long list of pretty specific doctrinal points, like one religion considering Tarot cards bad and another thinking that they were fine. If your Good and Bad sensations happened to precisely correspond to the recommendations of one particular religion, even in the cases where you didn’t actually know what the recommendations were beforehand, then that would be some evidence for the religion being true.
However, in practice there are a lot of religions, and a lot of different Christian sects and interpretations. You’ve said that you’ve chosen certain interpretations instead of others because that’s the interpretation that your sensations favored. Consider now that even if your sensations were just a quirk of your brain and mostly random, there are just so many different Christian sects and varying interpretations that it would be hard not to find some sect or interpretation of Christian doctrine who happened to prescribe the same things as your sensations do.
Then you need to additionally take into account ordinary cognitive flaws like confirmation bias: once you begin to believe in the hypothesis that your sensations reflect Christianity’s teachings, you’re likely to take relatively neutral passages and read into them doctrinal support for your position, and ignore passages which say contrary things.
In fact, if I’ve read you correctly, you’ve explicitly said that you choose the correct interpretation of Biblical passages based on your sensations, and the Biblical passages which are correct are the ones that give you a Good feeling. But you can’t then say that Christianity is true because it’s the Christian bits that give you the good feeling—you’ve defined “Christian doctrine” as “the bits that give a good feeling”, so “the bits that give a good feeling” can’t not be “Christian doctrine”!
Furthermore, our subconscious models are often accurate but badly understood by our conscious minds. For many skills, we’re able to say what’s the right or wrong way of doing something, but be completely unable to verbalize the reason. Likewise, you probably have a better subconscious model of what would be “typical” Christian dogma than you are consciously aware of. It is not implausible that you’d have a subconscious process making guesses on what would be a typical Christian response to something, giving you good or bad sensation based on that, and often guessing right (especially since, as noted before, there’s quite a lot of leeway in how a “Christian response” is defined).
For instance, you say that you hadn’t thought of Tarot cards being Bad before. But the traditional image of Christianity is that of being strongly opposed to witchcraft, and Tarot cards are used for divination, which is strongly related to witchcraft. Even if you hadn’t consciously made that connection, it’s obvious enough that your subconscious very well could have.
I don’t think the conclusion that the morality described by sensations A/B is a property of the universe at large has been justified. You mention that the sensations predict in advance what Christian doctrine describes as moral or immoral before you know directly what that doctrine says, but that strikes me as being an investigation method that is not useful, for two reasons:
Christian culture is is very heavily permeated throughout most English-speaking cultures. A person who grows up in such a culture will have a high likelihood of correctly guessing Christianity’s opinion on any given moral question, even if they haven’t personally read the relevant text.
More generally, introspection is a very problematic way of gathering data. Many many biases, both obvious and subtle, come into play, and make your job way more difficult. For example: Did you take notes on each instance of feeling A or B when it occurred, and use those notes (and only those notes) later when validating them against Christian doctrine? If not, you are much more likely to remember hits than misses, or even to after-the-fact readjust misses into hits; human memory is notorious for such things.
In a world entirely without morality, we are constantly facing situations where trusting another person would be mutually beneficial, but trusting when the other person betrays is much worse than mutual betrayal. Decision theory has a name for this type of problem: Prisoner’s Dilemma. The rational strategy is to defect, which makes a pretty terrible world.
But when playing an indefinite number of games, it turns out that cooperating, then punishing defection is a strong strategy in an environment of many distinct strategies. That looks a lot like “turn the other cheek” combined with a little bit of “eye for an eye.” Doesn’t the real world behavior consistent with that strategy vaguely resemble morality?
In short, decision theory suggests that material considerations can justify a substantial amount of “moral” behavior.
Regarding your sensations A and B, from the outside perspective it seems like you’ve been awfully lucky that your sense of right and wrong match your religious commitments. If you believed Westboro Baptist doctrine but still felt sensations A and B at the same times you feel them now, then you’d being doing sensation A behavior substantially more frequently. In other words, I could posit that you have a built-in morality oracle, but why should I believe that the oracle should be labelled Christian? If I had the same moral sensations you do, why shouldn’t I call it rationalist morality?
I would say tit-for-tat looks very much like “eye for an eye” but very little like “turn the other cheek”, which seems much more like a cooperatebot.
it’s turn the other cheek in the sense that you immediately forgive as soon as you figure out that your partner is willing to cooperate
But that’s also true with eye for an eye—one defection merits one defection; it’s not “two eyes for an eye”.
Fair enough. Usually, the sort of people who say “eye for eye” mean something closer to to “bag or rice for your entire life”, tho.
Edit: Calibration and all that, you know?
...I became a Christian and determined my religious beliefs based on sensations A and B. Why would I believe in unsupported doctrine that went against what I could determine of the world? I just can’t see myself doing that. My sense of right and wrong match my religious commitments because I chose my religious commitments so they would fit with my sense of right and wrong.
Because my built-in morality oracle likes the Christian Bible.
It’s sufficient to explain some, but not all, morality. Take tarot cards, for example. What was there in the ancestral environment to make those harmful? That just doesn’t make any sense with your theory of morality-as-iterated-Prisoner’s-Dilemma.
If you picked a sect based on your moral beliefs, then that is evidence that your Christianity is moral. It is not evidence that morality is your Christianity (i.e. “A implies B” is not equivalent “B implies A”).
And if playing with tarot cards could open a doorway for demons to enter the world (or whatever wrong they cause), it seems perfectly rational to morally condemn tarot cards. I don’t morally condemn tarot cards because I think they have the same mystical powers as regular playing cards (i.e. none). Also, I’m not intending to invoke “ancestral environment” when I invoke decision theory.
But that’s already conditional on a universe that looks different from what most atheists would say exists. If you see proof that tarot cards—or anything else—summon demons, your model of reality takes a hit.
I don’t understand. Can you clarify?
If tarot cards have mystical powers, I absolutely need to adjust my beliefs about the supernatural. But you seemed to assert that decision theory can’t say that tarot are immoral in the universes where they are actually dangerous.
Alice has a moral belief that divorce is immoral. This moral belief is supported by objective evidence. She is given a choice to live in Distopia, where divorce is permissible by law, and Utopia, where divorce is legally impossible. For the most part, Distopia and Utopia are very similar places to live. Predictably, Alice chooses to live in Utopia. The consistency between Alice’s (objectively true) morality and Utopian law is evidence that Utopia is moral. It is not evidence that Utopia is the cause of Alice’s morality (i.e. is not evidence that morality is Utopian—the grammatical ordering of phrases does not help making my point).
Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, that does make sense. Decision theory WOULD assert it, but to believe they’re immoral requires belief in some amount of supernatural something, right? Hence it makes no sense under what my prior assumptions were (namely, that there was nothing supernatural).
Oh, now I understand. That makes sense.
Accepting the existence of the demon portal should not impact your disbelief in a supernatural morality.
Anyways, the demons don’t even have to be supernatural. First hypothesis would be hallucination, second would be aliens.
I don’t see that decision theory cares why an activity is dangerous. Decision theory seems quite capable of imposing disincentives for poisoning (chemical danger) and cursing (supernatural danger) in proportion to their dangerousness and without regard to why they are dangerous.
The whole reason I’m invoking decision theory is to suggest that supernatural morality is not necessary to explain a substantial amount of human “moral” behavior.
You were not entirely clear, but you seem to be taking these as signals of things being Bad or Good in the morality sense, right? Ok so it feels like there is an objective morality. Let’s come up with hypotheses:
You have a morality that is the thousand shards of desire left over by an alien god. Things that were a good idea (for game theory, etc reasons) to avoid in the ancestral environment tend to feel good so that you would do them. Things that feel bad are things you would have wanted to avoid. As we know, an objective morality is what a personal morality feels like from the inside. That is, you are feeling the totally natural feelings of morality that we all feel. Why you attached special affect to the bible, I suppose that’s the affect hueristic: you feel like the bible is true and it is the center of your belief or something, and that goodness gets confused with a moral goodness. This is all hindsight, but it seems pretty sound.
Or it could be Jesus-is-Son-of-a-Benevolent-Love-Agent-That-Created-the-Universe. I guess God is sending you signals to say what sort of things he likes/doesn’t like? Is that the proposed mechanism for morality? I don’t know enough about the theory to say much more.
Ok now let’s consider the prior. The complex loving god hypothesis is incredibly complicated. Minds are so complex we can’t even build one yet. It would take a hell of a lot more than your feeling-of-morality evidence to even raise this to our attention. A lot more than any scientific hypothesis has ever collected, I would say. You must have other evidence, not only to overcome the prior, but all the evidence against a loving god who intelligently arranged anything,
Anyways, It sounds like you were primarily a moral nihilist before your encounter with the god-prescribes-a-morality hypothesis. Have you read Eliezers metaethics stuff? it deals the with subject of morality in a neutral universe quite well.
I’m afraid I don’t see why you call your reward-signal-from-god is an “objective morality” It sounds like the best course of action would be to learn the mechanism and seize control of it like AIXI would.
I (as a human) already have a strong morality, so if I figured out that the agent responsible for all of the evil in the universe were directly attempting to steer me with a subtle reward signal, I’d be pissed. It’s interesting that you didn’t have that reaction. I guess that’s the moral nihilism thing. You didn’t know you had your own morality.
There are two problems with this argument. First, each individual god might be very improbable, but that could be counterbalanced by the astronomical number of possible gods (e.g. consider all possible tweaks to the holy book), so you can argue apriori against specific flavors of theism but not against theism in general. Second, if Eliezer is right and AI can develop from a simple seed someone can code up in their garage, that means powerful minds don’t need high K-complexity. A powerful mind (or a program that blossoms into one) could even be simpler than physics as we currently know it, which is already quite complex and seems to have even more complexity waiting in store.
IMO a correct argument against theism should focus on the “loving” part rather than the “mind” part, and focus on evidence rather than complexity priors. The observed moral neutrality of physics is more probable if there’s no moral deity. Given what we know about evolution etc., it’s hard to name any true fact that makes a moral deity more likely.
I’m not sure that everything in my comment is correct. But I guess LW could benefit from developing an updated argument against (or for) theism?
Your argument about K-complexity is a decent shorthand but causes people to think that this “simplicity” thing is baked into the universe (universal prior) as if we had direct access to the universe (universal prior, reference machine language) and isn’t just another way of saying it’s more probable after having updated on a ton of evidence. As you said it should be about evidence not priors. No one’s ever seen a prior, at best a brain’s frequentist judgment about what “priors” are good to use when.
That may be somewhat misleading. A seed AI, denied access to external information, will be a moron. Yet the more information it takes into memory the higher the K-complexity of the thing, taken as a whole, is.
You might be able to code a relatively simple AI in your garage, but if it’s going to be useful it can’t stay simple.
ETA: Also if you take the computer system as a whole with all of the programming libraries and hardware arrangements—even ‘hello world’ would have high K-complexity. If you’re talking about whatsoever produces a given output on the screen in terms of a probability mass I’m not sure it’s reasonable to separate the two out and deal with K-complexity as simply a manifestation of high level APIs.
Relevant LW post.
For every every program that could be called a mind, there are very very very many that are not.
Eliezer’s “simple” seed AI is simple compared to an operating system (which people code up in their garages), not compared to laws of physics.
As long as we continue to accept occams razor, there’s no reason to postulate fundamental gods.
Given that a god exists by other means (alien singularity), I would expect it to appear approximately moral, because it would have created me (or modified me) with approximately it’s own morality. I assume that god would understand the importance of friendly intelligence. So yeah, the apparent neutrality is evidence against the existence of anything like a god.
Fair point, but I think you need lots of code only if you want the AI to run fast, and K-complexity doesn’t care about speed. A slow naive implementation of “perfect AI” should be about the size of the math required to define a “perfect AI”. I’d be surprised if it were bigger than the laws of physics.
You’re right; AIXI or whatever is probably around the same complexity as physics. I bet physics is a lot simpler than it appears right now tho.
Now I’m unsure that a fundamental intelligence even means anything. AIXI, for example is IIRC based on bayes and occam induction, who’s domain is cognitive engines within universes more or less like ours. What would a physics god optimising some morality even be able to see and do? It sure wouldn’t be constrained by bayes and such. Why not just replace it with a universe that is whatever morality maximised;
max(morality)is simpler thangod(morality)almost no matter how simple god is. Assuming a physics god is even a coherent concept.In our case, assuming a fundamental god is coherent, the “god did it” hypothesis is strictly defeated (same predictions, less theory) by the “god did physics” hypothesis, which is strictly defeated by the “physics” hypothesis. (becuase physics is a simpler morality than anything else that would produce our world, and if we use physics, god doesn’t have to exist)
That leaves us with only alien singularity gods, which are totally possible, but don’t exist here by the reasoning I gave in parent.
What did I miss?
That’s a reasonable bet. Another reasonable bet is that “laws of physics are about as complex as minds, but small details have too little measure to matter”.
Well, yeah. Then I guess the question is whether our universe is a byproduct of computing max(morality) for some simple enough “morality” that’s still recognizable as such. Will_Newsome seems to think so, or at least that’s the most sense I could extract from his comments...
Friendly intelligence is not particularly important when the intelligence in question is significantly less powerful an optimizer than its creator. I’m not really sure what would motivate a superintelligence to create entities like me, but given the assumption that one did so, it doesn’t seem more likely that it created me with (approximately) its own morality than that it created me with some different morality.
I take it you don’t think we have a chance of creating a superpowerful AI with our own morality?
We don’t have to be very intelligent to be a threat if we can create something that is.
I don’t think we have a chance of doing so if we have a superintelligent creator who has taken steps to prevent us from doing so, no. (I also don’t think it likely that we have such a creator.)
Bayesians don’t believe in evidence silly goose, you know that. Anyway, User:cousin_it, you’re essentially right, though I think that LW would benefit less from developing updated arguments and more from reading Aquinas, at least in the counterfactual universe where LW knew how to read. Anyway. In the real world Less Wrong is hopeless. You’re not hopeless. As a decision theorist you’re trying to find God, so you have to believe in him in a sense, right? And if you’re not trying to find God you should probably stay the hell away from FAI projects. Just sayin’.
A really intelligent response, so I upvoted you, even though, as I said, it surprised me by telling me that, just as one example, tarot cards are Bad when I had not even considered the possibility, so I doubt this came from inside me.
Well you are obviously not able to predict the output of your own brain, that’s the whole point of the brain. If morality is in the brain and still too complex to understand, you would expect to encounter moral feelings that you had not anticipated.
Er, I thought it was overall pretty lame, e.g. the whole question-begging w.r.t. the ‘prior probability of omnibenevolent omnipowerful thingy’ thingy (nothing annoys me more than abuses of probability theory these days, especially abuses of algorithmic probability theory). Perhaps you are conceding too much in order to appear reasonable. Jesus wasn’t very polite.
By the way, in case you’re not overly familiar with the heuristics and biases literature, let me give you a hint: it sucks. At least the results that most folk around her cite have basically nothing to do with rationality. There’s some quite good stuff with tons of citations, e.g. Gigerenzer’s, but Eliezer barely mentioned it to Less Wrong (as fastandfrugal.com which he endorsed) and therefore as expected Less Wrong doesn’t know about it. (Same with interpretations of quantum mechanics, as Mitchell Porter often points out. I really hope that Eliezer is pulling some elaborate prank on humanity. Maybe he’s doing it unwittingly.)
Anyway the upshot is that when people tell you about ‘confirmation bias’ as if it existed in the sense they think it does then they probably don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and you should ignore them. At the very least don’t believe them until you’ve investigated the literature yourself. I did so and was shocked at how downright anti-informative the field is, and less shocked but still shocked at how incredibly useless statistics is (both Bayesianism as a theoretical normative measure and frequentism as a practical toolset for knowledge acquisition). The opposite happened with the parapsychology literature, i.e. low prior, high posterior. Let’s just say that it clearly did not confirm my preconceptions; lolol.
Lastly, towards the esoteric end: All roads lead to Rome, if you’ll pardon a Catholicism. If they don’t it’s not because the world is mad qua mad; it is because it is, alas, sinful. An easy way to get to hell is to fall into a fully-general-counterargument blackhole, or a literal blackhole maybe. Those things freak me out.
(P.S. My totally obnoxious arrogance is mostly just a passive aggressive way of trolling LW. I’m not actually a total douchebag IRL. /recursive-compulsive-self-justification)
Explain?
Explain?
Elaborate?
I love how Less Wrong basically thinks that all evidence that doesn’t support its favored conclusion is bad because it just leads to confirmation bias. “The evidence is on your side, granted, but I have a fully general counterargument called ‘confirmation bias’ that explains why it’s not actually evidence!” Yeah, confirmation bias, one of the many claimed cognitive biases that arguably doesn’t actually exist. (Eliezer knew about the controversy, which is why his post is titled “Positive Bias”, which arguably also doesn’t exist, especially not in a cognitively relevant way.) Then they talk about Occam’s razor while completely failing to understand what algorithmic probability is actually saying. Hint: It definitely does not say that naturalistic mechanistic universes are a priori more probable! It’s like they’re trolling and I’m not supposed to feed them but they look sort of like a very hungry, incredibly stupid puppy.
Explain?
http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/gg_how_1991.pdf is exemplary of the stuff I’m thinking of. Note that that paper has about 560 citations. If you want to learn more then dig into the literature. I really like Gigerenzer’s papers as they’re well-cited and well-reasoned, and he’s a statistician. He even has a few papers about how to improve rationality, e.g. http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_How_1995.pdf has over 1,000 citations.
Searching and skimming, the first link does not seem to actually say that confirmation bias does not exist. It says that it does not appear to be the cause of “overconfidence bias”—it seems to take no position on whether it exists otherwise.
Okay, yeah, I was taking a guess. There are other papers that talk about confirmation/positive bias specifically, a lot of in the vein of this kinda stuff. Maybe Kaj’s posts called ‘Heuristics and Biases Biases?’ from here on LW references some relevant papers too. Sorry, I have limited cognitive resources at the moment, I’m mostly trying to point in the general direction of the relevant literature because there’s quite a lot of it.
Hard to know whether to agree or disagree without knowing “more probable than what?”
Sorry. More probable than supernaturalistic universes of the sort that the majority of humans finds more likely (where e.g. psi phenomena exist).
So I think you’re quite right in that “supernatural” and “natural” are sets that contain possible universes of very different complexity and that those two adjectives are not obviously relevant to the complexity of the universes they describe. I support tabooing those terms. But if you compare two universes, one of which is described most simply by the wave function and an initial state, and another which is described by the wave function, an initial state and another section of code describing the psychic powers of certain agents the latter universe is a priori more unlikely (bracketing for the moment the simulation issue), Obviously if psi phenomenon can be incorporated into the physical model without adding additional lines of code that’s another matter entirely.
Returning to the simulation issue I take your position to be that there are conceivable “meta-physics” (meant literally; not necessarily referring to the branch of philosophy) which can make local complexities more common? Is that a fair restatement? I have a suspicion that this is not possibly without paying the complexity back at the other end, though I’m not sure.
Boltzmann brain, maybe?
Explain?
What was said that’s a synonym for or otherwise invoked the confirmation bias?
It’s mentioned a few times in this thread re AspiringKnitter’s evidence for Christianity. I’m too lazy to link to them, especially as it’d be so easy to get the answer to your question with control+f “confirmation” that I’m not sure I interpreted it correctly?
Just to echo the others that brought this up, I applaud your courage; few people have the guts to jump into the lions’ den, as it were. That said, I’m going to play the part of the lion (*) on this topic.
How do you know that these sensations come from a supernatural entity, and not from your own brain ? I know that if I started experiencing odd physical sensations, no matter how pleasant, this would be my first hypothesis (especially since, in my personal case, the risk of stroke is higher than average). In fact, if I experienced anything that radically contradicted my understanding of the world, I’d probably consider the following explanations, in order of decreasing likelihood:
I am experiencing some well-known cognitive bias.
My brain is functioning abnormally and thus I am experiencing hallucinations.
Someone is playing a prank on me.
Shadowy human agencies are testing a new chemical/biological/emissive device on me.
A powerful (yet entirely material) alien is inducing these sensations, for some reason.
A trickster spirit (such as a Kami, or the Coyote, etc.) is doing the same by supernatural means.
A localized god is to blame (Athena, Kali, the Earth Mother, etc.)
An omniscient, omnipotent, and generally all-everything entity is responsible.
This list is not exhaustive, obviously, it’s just some stuff I came up with off the top of my head. Each next bullet point is less probable than the one before it, and thus I’d have to reject pretty much every other explanation before arriving at “the Christian God exists”.
(*) Or a bobcat, at least.
Is either of those well-known? What about the pattern with which they’re felt? Sound like anything you know? Me neither.
That don’t have any other effect? That remain stable for years? With no other sign of mental illness? Besides, if I set out by assuming that I can’t tell anything because I’m crazy anyway, what good does that do me? It doesn’t tell me what to predict. It doesn’t tell me what to do. All it tells me is “expect nothing and believe nothing”. If I assume it’s just these hallucinations and everything else is normal, then I run into “my brain is functioning abnormally and I am experiencing hallucinations that tell me Christian doctrine is true even when I don’t know the doctrine in question”, which is the original problem you’re trying to explain.
And instead of messing with me like a real trickster, it convinces me to worship something other than it and in so doing increases my quality of life?
You’ve read xkcd?
In addition to dlthomas’s suggestion of the affect heuristic, I’d suggest something like the ideomotor effect amplified by confirmation bias.
However, there’s a reason I put “cognitive bias” as the first item on my list: I believe that it is overwhelmingly more likely than any alternatives. Thus, it would take a significant amount of evidence to convince me that I’m not laboring under such a bias, even if the bias does not yet have a catchy name.
AFAIK some brain cancers can present this way. In any case, if I started experiencing unusual physical symptoms all of a sudden, I’d consult a medical professional. Then I’d write down the results of his tests, and consult a different medical professional, just in case. Better safe than sorry.
Trickster spirits (especially Tanuki or Kitsune) rarely demand worship; messing with people is enough for them. Some such spirits are more or less benign; the Tanuki and Raven both would probably be on board with the idea of tricking a human into improving his or her life.
That said, you skipped over human agents and aliens, both of which are IMO overwhelmingly more likely to exist than spirits (though that doesn’t make them likely to exist in absolute terms).
Hadn’t everyone ? :-)
.
It sounds a little like the affect heuristic.
AspiringKnitter, what do you think about people who have sensory experiences that indicate that some other religion or text is correct?
Do they actually exist?
Well, as best I can tell my maintainer didn’t install the religion patch, so all I’m working with is the testaments of others; but I have seen quite a variety of such testaments. Buddhism and Hinduism have a typology of religious experience much more complex than anything I’ve seen systematically laid down in mainline Christianity; it’s usually expressed in terms unique to the Dharmic religions, but vipassanā for example certainly seems to qualify as an experiential pointer to Buddhist ontology.
If you’d prefer Western traditions, a phrase I’ve heard kicked around in the neopagan, reconstructionist, and ceremonial magic communities is “unsubstantiated personal gnosis”. While that’s a rather flippant way of putting it, it also seems to point to something similar to your experiences.
Huh, interesting. I should study that in more depth, then.
Careful, you may end up like Draco in HPMoR chapter 23, without a way to gom jabbar the guilty parties (sorry about the formatting):
Nah, false beliefs are worthless. That which is true is already so; owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. If I turned out to actually be wrong—well, I have experience being wrong about religion. I’d probably react just like I did before.
Feel free to elaborate or link if you have talked about it before.
I used to be an atheist before realizing that was incorrect. I wasn’t upset about that; I had been wrong, I stopped being wrong. Is that enough?
Intriguing. I wonder what made you see the light.
Sure. Pick a religion.
God does not solve this problem.
It sounded like she was already coming down on the side of the good being good because it is commanded by God when she said, “an innate morality that seems, possibly, somewhat arbitrary.”
So maybe the dilemma is not such a problem for her.
.
I can understand your hesitation about telling that story. Thanks for sharing it.
Some questions, if you feel like answering them:
Can you give me some examples of things you hadn’t known Christian doctrine considered Bad before you sensed them as A?
If you were advising someone who lacks the ability to sense Good and Bad directly on how to have accurate beliefs about what’s Good and Bad, what advice would you give? (It seems to follow from what you’ve said elsewhere that simply telling them to believe Christianity isn’t sufficient, since lots of people sincerely believe they are following the directive to “believe Christianity” and yet end up believing Bad things. It seems something similar applies to “believe the New Testament”. Or does it?)
If you woke up tomorrow and you experienced sensation A in situations that were consistent with Christianity being true, and experienced sensation B in situations that were consistent with Islam being true, what would you conclude about the world based on those experiences?
** EDIT: My original comment got A and B reversed. Fixed.
Upvoted for courage.
.
I think that should probably be AspiringKnitter’s call. (I don’t think you’re pushing too hard, given the general norms of this community, but I’m not sure of what our norms concerning religious discussions are.)
If you want it to be my call, then I say go ahead.
Do you currently get a “Bad” signal on other holy books?
Do you get it when you don’t know it’s another holy book?
Let’s try that! I got a Bad signal on the Koran and a website explaining the precepts of Wicca, but I knew what both of those were. I would be up for trying a test where you give me quotes from the Christian Bible (warning: I might recognize them; if so, I’ll tell you, but for what it’s worth I’ve only read part of Ezekiel, but might recognize the story anyway… I’ve read a lot of the Bible, actually), other holy books and neutral sources like novels (though I might have read those, too; I’ll tell you if I recognize them), without telling me where they’re from. If it’s too difficult to find Biblical quotes, other Christian writings might serve, as could similar writings from other religions. I should declare up front that I know next to nothing about Hinduism but once got a weak Good reading from what someone said about it. Also, I would prefer longer quotes; the feelings build up from unnoticeable, rather than hitting full-force instantly. If they could be at least as long as a chapter of the Bible, that would be good.
That is, if you’re actually proposing that we test this. If you didn’t really want to, sorry. It just seems cool.
Upvoted for the willingness to test, and in general for being a good sport.
Try this one:
The preparatory prayer is made according to custom.
The first prelude will be a certain historical consideration of ___ on the one part, and __ on the other, each of whom is calling all men to him, to be gathered together under his standard.
The second is, for the construction of the place, that there be represented to us a most extensive plain around Jerusalem, in which ___ stands as the Chief-General of all good people. Again, another plain in the country of Babylon, where ___ presents himself as the captain of the wicked and [God’s] enemies.
The third, for asking grace, will be this, that we ask to explore and see through the deceits- of the evil captain, invoking at the same time the Divine help in order to avoid them ; and to know, and by grace be able to imitate, the sincere ways of the true and most excellent General, ___ .
The first point is, to imagine before my eyes, in the Babylonian plain, the captain of the wicked, sitting in a chair of fire and smoke, horrible in figure, and terrible in countenance.
The second, to consider how, having as sembled a countless number of demons, he disperses them through the whole world in order to do mischief; no cities or places, no kinds of persons, being left free.
The third, to consider what kind of address he makes to his servants, whom he stirs up to seize, and secure in snares and chains, and so draw men (as commonly happens) to the desire of riches, whence afterwards they may the more easily be forced down into the ambition of worldly honour, and thence into the abyss of pride.
Thus, then, there are three chief degrees of temptation, founded in riches, honours, and pride; from which three to all other kinds of vices the downward course is headlong.
If I had more of the quote, it would be easier. I get a weak Bad feeling, but while the textual cues suggest it probably comes from either the Talmud or the Koran, and while I think it is, I’m not getting a strong feeling on this quote, so this makes me worry that I could be confused by my guess as to where it comes from.
But I’m going to stick my neck out anyway; I feel like it’s Bad.
That is what I had expected. St. Ignatius is a Catholic frequently derided by non-Catholic fundamentalist Christians.
I think it’s here
I admit to being surprised that this is a Christian writing.
What do you think of this; it’s a little less obscure:
Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if [God] should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock. Were it not that so is the sovereign pleasure of [God], the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the sun don’t willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and [the evil one]; the earth don’t willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air don’t willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service of [God]‘s enemies. [God]‘s creatures are good, and were made for men to serve [God] with, and don’t willingly subserve to any other purpose, and groan when they are abused to purposes so directly contrary to their nature and end. And the world would spew you out, were it not for the sovereign hand of him who hath subjected it in hope. There are the black clouds of [God]’s wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm, and big with thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of [God] it would immediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of [God] for the present stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury, and your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like the chaff of the summer threshing floor.
Bad? I think Bad, but wish I had more of the quote.
That moderately surprises me. It’s from “Sinners in the hands of an angry god” by Johnathan Edwards.
I recognized it by the first sentence, but then I have read it several times. (For those of you that haven’t heard of it, it is probably the most famous American sermon, delivered in 1741.)
I think it’s this.
Huh! How about this:
… the mysterious (tablet)…is surrounded by an innumerable company of angels; these angels are of all kinds, — some brilliant and flashing , down to . The light comes and goes on the tablet; and now it is steady...
And now there comes an Angel, to hide the tablet with his mighty wing. This Angel has all the colours mingled in his dress; his head is proud and beautiful; his headdress is of silver and red and blue and gold and black, like cascades of water, and in his left hand he has a pan-pipe of the seven holy metals, upon which he plays. I cannot tell you how wonderful the music is, but it is so wonderful that one only lives in one’s ears; one cannot see anything any more.
Now he stops playing and moves with his finger in the air. His finger leaves a trail of fire of every colour, so that the whole Aire is become like a web of mingled lights. But through it all drops dew.
(I can’t describe these things at all. Dew doesn’t represent what I mean in the least. For instance, these drops of dew are enormous globes, shining like the full moon, only perfectly transparent, as well as perfectly luminous.) … All this while the dewdrops have turned into cascades of gold finer than the eyelashes of a little child. And though the extent of the Aethyr is so enormous, one perceives each hair separately, as well as the whole thing at once. And now there is a mighty concourse of angels rushing toward me from every side, and they melt upon the surface of the egg in which I am standing __, so that the surface of the egg is all one dazzling blaze of liquid light.
Now I move up against the tablet, — I cannot tell you with what rapture. And all the names of __, that are not known even to the angels, clothe me about. All the seven senses are transmuted into one sense, and that sense is dissolved in itself …
Neutral/no idea.
This is it
Huh. Odd.
Yes, I was trying to figure out how much of the feeling had to do with lack of Hell (answer: not all of it). The Tarot does fit the pattern.
? I’m confused.
Good for you. ^_^
You had a Bad feeling about two Christian quotes that mentioned Hell or demons/hellfire. You also got a Good feeling about a quote from Nietzsche that didn’t mention Hell. I don’t know the context of your reactions to the Tarot and Wicca, but obviously people have linked those both to Hell. (See also Horned God, “Devil” trump.) So I wanted to get your reaction to a passage with no mention of Hell from an indeterminate religion, in case that sufficed to make it seem Good.
The author designed a famous Tarot deck, and inspired a big chunk (at minimum) of Wicca.
I hadn’t considered that hypothesis. I’d upvote for the novel theory, but now that you’ve told me you’ll never be able to trust further reactions that could confirm or deny it, which seems like it’s worth a downvote, so not voting your post up or down. That said, I think this fails to explain having a Bad reaction to this page and the entire site it’s on, despite thinking before reading it that Wicca was foofy nonsense and completely not expecting to find evil of that magnitude (a really, really strong feeling—none of the quotes you guys have asked me about have been even a quarter that bad). It wasn’t slow, either; unlike most other things, it was almost immediately obvious. (The fact that this has applied to everything else I’ve ever read about Wicca since—at least, everything written by Wiccans about their own religion—could have to do with expectation, so I can see where you wouldn’t regard subsequent reactions as evidence… but the first one, at least, caught me totally off-guard.)
I know who Crowley is. (It was his tarot deck that someone gave me as a gift—and I was almost happy about it, because I’d actually been intending to research tarot because it seemed cool and I meant to use the information for a story I was writing. But then I felt like, you know, Bad, so I didn’t end up using it.) That’s why I was surprised not to have a bad feeling about his writings.
One more, then I’ll stop.
Man is a rope tied between beast and [superior man] - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an overture and a going under.
I love those that know not how to live except by going under, for they are those who cross over.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great reverers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going under and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may some day become the [superior man’s].
I love him who lives to know, and wants to know so that the [superior man] may live some day. Thus he wants to go under.
I love him who works and invents to build a house for the [superior man] and to prepare earth, animal, and plant for him: for thus he wants to go under.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to go under, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who does not hold back one drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides over the bridge as spirit.
I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and catastrophe: for his virtue’s sake he wants to live on and to live no longer.
I love him who does not want to have too many virtues. One virtue is more virtue than two, because it is more of a noose on which his catastrophe may hang.
I love him whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and returns none: for he always gives away, and does not want to preserve himself.
I love him who is abashed when the dice fall to make his fortune, and who asks: “Am I a crooked gambler?” For he wants to perish.
I love him who casts golden words before his deed, and always does more than he promises: for he wants to go under.
I love him who justifies future and redeems past generations: for he wants to perish of the present.
I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must perish of the wrath of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in being wounded, and who can perish of a small experience: thus he gladly goes over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things spell his going under.
I love him who has a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the entrails of his heart, but his heart causes him to go under.
I love all who are as heavy drops, falling one by one out of the dark cloud that hangs over men: they herald the advent of lightning, and, as heralds, they perish.
Behold, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called [superior man].
I know very little about Nietzsche, but I recognized this instantly because the first three lines were quoted in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. :-)
I get a moderate Good reading (?!) and I’m confused to get it because the morality the person is espousing seems wrong. I’m guessing this comes from someone’s writings about their religion, possibly an Eastern religion?
Walter Kaufman (Nietzsche’s translator here) prefers overman as the best translation of ubermensch.
ETA: This is some interesting commentary on the work
I’m surprised. I’d heard Nietzsche was not a nice person, but had also heard good things about him… huh. I’ll have to read his work, now. I wonder if the library has some.
Niezsche’s sister was an anti-semite and a German nationalist. After Nietzsche’s death, she edited his works into something that became an intellectual foundation for Nazism. Thus, he got a terrible reputation in the English speaking world.
It’s tolerable clear from a reading of his unabridged works that Nietzsche would have hated Nazism. But he would not have identified himself as Christian (at least as measured by a typical American today). He went mad before he died, and the apocryphal tale is that the last thing he did before being institutionalize was to see a horse being beaten on the street and moving to protect it.
To see his moral thought, you could read Thus Spake Zarathustra. To see why he isn’t exactly Christian, you can look at The Geneology of Morals. Actually, you might also like Kierkegaard because he expresses somewhat similar thoughts, but within a Christian framework.
To really see why he isn’t Christian, read The Antichrist.
As with what he wrote in Genealogy of Morals, it is unclear how tongue-in-cheek/intentional provocative Nietzsche is being. I’m honestly not sure whether Nietzsche thought the “master morality” was better or worse than the “slave morality.”
The sense I get—but note that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve read any substantial amount of Nietzsche—is that he treats master morality as more honest, and perhaps what we could call psychologically healthier, than slave morality, but does not advocate that the former be adopted over the latter by people living now; the transition between the two is usually explained in terms of historical changes. The morality embodied by his superior man is neither, or a synthesis of the two, and while he says a good deal about what it’s not I don’t have a clear picture of many positive traits attached to it.
That’s because the superman, by definition, invents his own morality. If you read a book telling you the positive content of morality and implement it because the eminent philosopher says so, you ain’t superman.
I wouldn’t call him a fully sane person, especially in his later work (he suffered in later life from mental problems most often attributed to neurosyphilis, and it shows), but he has a much worse reputation than I think he really deserves. I’d recommend Genealogy of Morals and The Gay Science; they’re both laid out a bit more clearly than the works he’s most famous for, which tend to be heavily aphoristic and a little scattershot.
It’s easy to find an equally forceful bit by Nietzsche that’s not been quoted to death, really. Had AK recognized it, you would’ve botched a perfectly good test.
It’s being a long time since I read that… I guess Nietzsche wouldn’t have found “moderation in all things” too appealing...
Cute.
Because I’m curious
Fairly read as a whole and in the context of the trial, the instructions required the jury to find that Chiarella obtained his trading advantage by misappropriating the property of his employer’s customers. The jury was charged that,
Record 677 (emphasis added). The language parallels that in the indictment, and the jury had that indictment during its deliberations; it charged that Chiarella had traded “without disclosing the material non-public information he had obtained in connection with his employment.” It is underscored by the clarity which the prosecutor exhibited in his opening statement to the jury. No juror could possibly have failed to understand what the case was about after the prosecutor said:
“In sum, what the indictment charges is that Chiarella misused material nonpublic information for personal gain and that he took unfair advantage of his position of trust with the full knowledge that it was wrong to do so. That is what the case is about. It is that simple.”
Id. at 46. Moreover, experienced defense counsel took no exception and uttered no complaint that the instructions were inadequate in this regard. [Therefore, the conviction is due to be affirmed].
I get no reading here. My guess is that this is some sort of legal document, in which case I’m not really surprised to get no reading. Is that correct?
Yes, it is a legal document. Specifically a dissent from the reversal of a criminal conviction. In particular, I think the quoted text is an incredibly immoral and wrong-headed understanding of American criminal law. Which makes it particularly depressing that the writer was Chief Justice when he wrote it
With, I assume, the names changed? Otherwise it seems too easy :-P
Yes, where names need to be changed. [God] will be sufficient to confuse me as to whether it’s “the LORD” or “Allah” in the original source material. There might be a problem with substance in very different holy books where I might be able to guess the religion just by what they’re saying (like if they talk about reincarnation or castes, I’ll know they’re Hindu or Buddhist). I hope anyone finding quotes will avoid those, of course.
This is a bit off-topic, but, out of curiosity, is there anything in particular that you find objectionable about Wicca on a purely analytical level ? I’m not saying that you must have such a reason, I’m just curious.
Just in the interests of pure disclosure, the reason I ask is because I found Wicca to be the least harmful religion among all the religions I’d personally encountered. I realize that, coming from an atheist, this doesn’t mean much, of course...
Assuming you mean besides the fact that it’s wrong (by both meanings—incorrect and sinful), then no, nothing at all.
I’m actually not entirely sure what you mean by “incorrect”, and how it differs from “sinful”. As an atheist, I would say that Wicca is “incorrect” in the same way that every other religion is incorrect, but presumably you’d disagree, since you’re religious.
Some Christians would say that Wicca is both “incorrect” and “sinful” because its followers pray to the wrong gods, since a). YHVH/Jesus is the only God who exists, thus worshiping other (nonexistent) gods is incorrect, and b). he had expressly commanded his followers to worship him alone, and disobeying God is sinful. In this case, though, the “sinful” part seems a bit redundant (since Wiccans would presumably worship Jesus if they were convinced that he existed and their own gods did not). But perhaps you meant something else ?
I mean incorrect in that they believe things that are wrong, yes; they believe in, for instance, a goddess who doesn’t really exist. And sinful because witchcraft is forbidden.
Wouldn’t this imply that witchcraft is effective, though ? Otherwise it wouldn’t be forbidden; after all, God never said (AFAIK), “you shouldn’t pretend to cast spells even though they don’t really work”, nor did he forbid a bunch of other stuff that is merely silly and a waste of time. But if witchcraft is effective, it would imply that it’s more or less “correct”, which is why I was originally confused about what you meant.
FWIW, I feel compelled to point out that some Wiccans believe in multiple gods or none at all, even though this is off-topic—since I can practically hear my Wiccan acquaintances yelling at me in the back of my head… metaphorically speaking, that is.
Yes.
Which is still wrong.
Ok, but in that case, isn’t witchcraft at least partially “correct” ? Otherwise, how can they cast all those spells and make them actually work (assuming, that is, that their spells actually do work) ?
By consorting with demons.
Ah, right, so you believe that the entities that Wiccans worship do in some way exist, but that they are actually demons, not benign gods.
I should probably point out at this point that Wiccans (well, at least those whom I’d met), consider this point of view utterly misguided and incredibly offensive. No one likes to be called a “demon-worshiper”, especially when one is generally a nice person whose main tenet in life is a version of “do no harm”. You probably meant no disrespect, but flat-out calling a whole group of people “demon-worshipers” tends to inflame passions rather quickly, and not in a good way.
That’s a bizarre thing to say. Is their offense evidence that I’m wrong? I don’t think so; I’d expect it whether or not they worship demons. Or should I believe something falsely because the truth is offensive? That would go against my values—and, dare I say it, the suggestion is offensive. ;) Or do you want me to lie so I’ll sound less offensive? That risks harm to me (it’s forbidden by the New Testament) and to them (if no one ever tells them the truth, they can’t learn), as well as not being any fun.
What is true is already so, Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
Nice people like that deserve truth, not lies, especially when eternity is at stake.
So does calling people Cthulhu-worshipers. But when you read that article, you agreed that it was apt, right? Because you think it’s true. You guys sure seem quick to tell me that my beliefs are offensive, but if I said the same to you, you’d understand why that’s beside the point. If Wiccans worship demons, I desire to believe that Wiccans worship demons; if Wiccans don’t worship demons, I desire to believe that Wiccans don’t worship demons. Sure, it’s offensive and un-PC. If you want me to stop believing it, tell me why you think it’s wrong.
I like your post (and totally agree with the first paragraph), but have some concerns that are a little different from Bugmaster’s.
What’s the exact difference between a god and a demon? Suppose Wicca is run by a supernatural being (let’s call her Astarte) who asks her followers to follow commendable moral rules, grants their petitions when expressed in the ritualistic form of spells, and insists she will reward the righteous and punishes the wicked. You worship a different supernatural being who also asks His followers to follow commendable moral rules, grants their petitions when expressed in the ritualistic form of prayer, and insists He will reward the righteous and punish the wicked. If both Jehovah and Astarte exist and act similarly, why name one “a god” and the other “a demon”? Really, the only asymmetry seems to be that Jehovah tries to inflict eternal torture on people who prefer Astarte, where Astarte has made no such threats among people who prefer Jehovah, which is honestly advantage Astarte. So why not just say “Of all the supernatural beings out there, some people prefer this one and other people prefer that one”?
I mean, one obvious answer is certainly to list the ways Jehovah is superior to Astarte—the one created the Universe, the other merely lives in it; the one is all-powerful, the other merely has some magic; the one is wise and compassionate, the other evil and twisted. But all of these are Jehovah’s assertions. One imagines Astarte makes different assertions to her followers. The question is whose claims to believe.
Jehovah has a record of making claims which seem to contradict the evidence from other sources—the seven-day creation story, for example. And He has a history of doing things which, when assessed independently of their divine origin, we would consider immoral—the Massacre of the Firstborn in Exodus, or sanctioning the rape, enslavement, infanticide, and genocide of the Canaanites. So it doesn’t seem obvious at all that we should trust His word over Astarte’s, especially since you seem to think that Astarte’s main testable claim—that she does magic for her followers—is true.
Now, you’ve already said that you believe in Christianity because of direct personal revelation—a sense of serenity and rightness when you hear its doctrines, and a sense of repulsion from competing religions, and that this worked even when you didn’t know what religion you were encountering and so could not bias the result. I upvoted you when you first posted this because I agree that such feelings could provide some support for religious belief. But that was before you said you believed in competing supernatural beings. Surely you realize how difficult a situation that puts you in?
Giving someone a weak feeling of serenity or repulsion is, as miracles go, not a very flashy one. One imagines it would take only simple magic, and should be well within the repertoire of even a minor demon or spirit. And you agree that Astarte performs minor miracles of the same caliber all the time to try to convince her own worshippers. So all that your feelings indicate is that some supernatural being is trying to push you toward Christianity. If you already believe that there are multiple factions of supernatural beings, some of whom push true religions and others of whom push false ones, then noticing that some supernatural being is trying to push you toward Christianity provides zero extra evidence that Christianity is true.
Why should you trust the supernatural beings who have taken an interest in your case, as opposed to the supernatural beings apparently from a different faction who caused the seemingly miraculous revelations in this person and this person’s lives?
Since you use the names Jehovah and Astarte, I’ll follow suit, though they’re not the names I prefer.
The difference would be that if worship of Jehovah gets you eternal life in heaven, and worship of Astarte gets you eternal torture and damnation, then you should worship Jehovah and not Astarte. Also, if Astarte knows this, but pretends otherwise, then Astarte’s a liar.
Not quite. I only believe in “multiple factions of supernatural beings” (actually only two) because it’s implied by Christianity being true. It’s not a prior belief. If Christianity is false, one or two or fifteen or zero omnipotent or slightly-powerful or once-human or monstrous gods could exist, but if Christianity is false I’d default to atheism, since if my evidence for Christianity proved false (say, I hallucinated it all because of some undiagnosed mental illness that doesn’t resemble any currently-known mental illness and only causes that one symptom) without my gaining additional evidence for some other religion or non-atheist cosmology, I’d have no evidence for anything spiritual. Or do I misunderstand? I’m confused.
Being, singular, first of all.
I already know myself, what kind of a person I am. I know how rational I am. I know how non-crazy I am. I know exactly the extent to which I’ve considered illness affecting my thoughts as a possible explanation.
I know I’m not lying.
The first person became an apostate, something I’ve never done, and is still confused years later. The second person records only the initial conversion, while I know how it’s played out in my own life for several years.
The second person is irrationally turned off by even the mere appearance of Catholicism and Christianity in general because of terrible experiences with Catholics.
I discount all miracle stories from people I don’t know, including Christian and Jewish miracle stories, which could at least plausibly be true. I discount them ALL when I don’t know the person. In fact, that means MOST of the stories I hear and consider unlikely (without passing judgment when I have so little info) are stories that, if true, essentially imply Christianity, while others would provide evidence for it.
And knowing how my life has gone, I know how I’ve changed as a person since accepting Jesus, or Jehovah if that’s the word you prefer. They don’t mention drastic changes to their whole personalities to the point of near-unrecognizability even to themselves. In brief: I was unbelievably awful. I was cruel, hateful, spiteful, vengeful and not a nice person. I was actively hurtful toward everyone, including immediate family. After finding Jesus, I slowly became a less horrible person, until I got to where I am now. Self-evaluation may be somewhat unreliable, but I think the lack of any physical violence recently is a good sign. Also, rather than escalating arguments as far as possible, when I realize I’ve lashed out, I deliberately make an effort not to fall prey to consistency bias and defend my actions, but to stop and apologize and calm down. That’s something I would not have done—would not have WANTED to do, would not have thought was a good idea, before.
I don’t know (I only guess) what Astarte does to xyr worshipers. I’m conjecturing; I’ve never prayed to xem, nor have I ever been a Wiccan or any other type of non-Christian religion. But I think I ADBOC this statement; if said by me, it would have sounded more like “Satan makes xyrself look very appealing”.
(I’m used to a masculine form for this being. You’re using a feminine form. Rather than argue, I’ve simply shifted my pronoun usage to an accurate—possibly more accurate—and less loaded set of pronouns.)
Also, my experience suggests that if something is good or evil, and you’re open to the knowledge, you’ll see through any lies or illusions with time. It might be a lot of time—I’ll confess I recently got suckered into something for, I think, a couple of years, when I really ought to have known better much sooner, and no, I don’t want to talk about it—but to miss it forever requires deluding yourself.
(Not, as we all know, that self-delusion is particularly rare...)
That someone is trying to convince me to be a Christian or that I perceive the nature of things using an extra sense.
Strength varies. Around the time I got to the fourth Surah of the Koran, it was much flashier than anything I’ve seen since, including everything previously described (on the negative side) at incredible strength plus an olfactory hallucination. And the result of, I think, two days straight of Bible study and prayer at all times constantly… well, that was more than a weak feeling of serenity. But on its own it’d be pretty weak evidence, because I was only devoting so much time to prayer because my state of mind was so volatile and my thoughts and feelings were unreliable. It’s only repetitions of that effect that let me conclude that it means what I’ve already listed, after controlling for other possibilities that are personal so I don’t want to talk about it. Those are rare extremes, though; normally it’s not as flashy as those.
I consider it way likelier than you do, anyway. I’m only around fiftyish percent confidence here. But that’s only one aspect of it. Their religion also claims to cause changes in its followers along the lines of “more in tune with the Divine” or something, right? So if there are any overlapping claims about morality, that would also be testable—NOT absolute morality of the followers, but change in morality on mutually-believed-in traits, measuring before and after conversion, then a year on, then a few years on, then several years on. Of course, I’m not sure how you’ll ever get the truth about how moral people are when they think no one’s watching...
Sorry—I used “Astarte” and the female pronoun because the Wiccans claim to worship a Goddess, and Astarte was the first female demon I could think of. If we’re going to go gender-neutral, I recommend “eir”, just because I think it’s the most common gender neutral pronoun on this site and there are advantages to standardizing this sort of thing.
Well, okay, but this seems to be an argument from force, sort of “Jehovah is a god and Astarte a demon because if I say anything else, Jehovah will torture me”. It seems to have the same form as “Stalin is not a tyrant, because if I call Stalin a tyrant, he will kill me, and I don’t want that!”
It sounds like you’re saying the causal history of your belief should affect the probability of it being true.
Suppose before you had any mystical experience, you had non-zero probabilities X of atheism, Y of Christianity (in which God promotes Christianity and demons promote non-Christian religions like Wicca), and Z of any non-Christian religion (in which God promotes that religion and demons promote Christianity).
Then you experience an event which you interpret as evidence for a supernatural being promoting Christianity. This should raise the probability of Y and Z an equal amount, since both theories seem to equally predict this would happen.
You could still end up a Christian if you started off with a higher probability Y than Z, but it sounds like you weren’t especially interested in Christianity before your mystical experience, and the prior for Z is higher than Y since there are so many more non-Christian than Christian religions.
I understand you as having two categories of objections: first, objections that the specific people in the Islamic conversion stories are untrustworthy or their stories uninteresting (3,4,6). Second, that you find mystical experiences by other people inherently hard to believe but you believe your own because you are a normal sane person (1,2,5).
The first category of objections apply only to those specific people’s stories. That’s fair enough since those were the ones I presented, but they were the ones I presented because they were the first few good ones I found in the vast vast vast vast VAST Islamic conversion story literature. I assume that if you were to list your criteria for believability, we could eventually find some Muslim who experienced a seemingly miraculous conversion who fit all of those criteria (including changing as a person) - if it’s important to you to test this, we can try.
The second category of objections is more interesting. Different studies show somewhere from a third to half of Americans having mystical experiences, including about a third of non-religious people who have less incentive to lie. Five percent of people experience them “regularly”. Even granted that some of these people are lying and other people categorize “I felt really good” as a mystical experience, I don’t think denying that these occur is really an option.
The typical view that people need to be crazy, or on the brink of death, or uneducated, or something other than a normal middle class college-educated WASP adult in order to have mystical experiences also breaks down before the evidence. According to Greeley 1975 and Hay and Morisy 1976, well-educated upper class people are more likely to have mystical experiences, and Hay and Morisy 1978 found that people with mystical experiences are more likely to be mentally well-balanced.
Since these experiences occur with equal frequency among people of all religion and even atheists, I continue to think this supports either the “natural mental process” idea or the “different factions of demons” idea—you can probably guess which one I prefer :)
There are 1.57 billion Muslims and 2.2 billion Christians in the world. Barring something very New-Agey going on, at least one of those groups believes an evil lie. The number of Muslims who convert to Christianity at some point in their lives, or vice versa, is only a tiny fraction of a percent. So either only a tiny fraction of a percent of people are open to the knowledge—so tiny that you could not reasonably expect yourself to be among them—or your experience has just been empirically disproven.
(PS: You’re in a lot of conversations at once—let me know if you want me to drop this discussion, or postpone it for later)
Speaking of mystical experiences, my religion tutor at the university (an amazing woman, Christian but pretty rational and liberal) had one, as she told us, in transport one day, and that’s when she converted, despite growing up at an atheistic middle-class Soviet family.
Oh, and the closest thing I ever had to one was when I tried sensory deprivation + dissociatives (getting high on cough syrup, then submersing myself in a warm bath with lights out and ears plugged; had a timer set to 40 minutes and a thin ray of light falling where I could see it by turning my head as precaution against, y’know, losing myself). That experiment was both euphoric and interesting, but I wouldn’t really want to repeat it. I experienced blissful ego death and a feeling of the universe spinning round and round in cycles, around where I would be, but where now was nothing. It’s hard to describe.
And then, well, I saw the tiny, shining shape of Rei Ayanami. She was standing in her white plugsuit amidst the blasted ruins on a dead alien world, and I got the feeling that she was there to restore it to life. She didn’t look at me, but I knew she knew I saw her. Then it was over.
Fret not, I didn’t really make any more bullshit out of that, but it’s certainly an awesome moment to remember.
Unless I know them already. Once I already know people for honest, normal, sane people (“normal” isn’t actually required and I object to the typicalist language), their miracle stories have the same weight as my own. Also, miracles of more empirically-verifiable sorts are believable when vetted by snopes.com.
Xe is poetic and awesome. I’m hoping it’ll become standard English. To that end, I use it often.
I read your first link and I’m very surprised because I didn’t expect something like that. It would be interesting to talk to that person about this.
Is that surprising? First of all, I know that I already converted to Christianity, rather than just having assumed it always, so I’m already more likely to be open to new facts. And second, I thought it was common knowledge around these parts that most people are really, really bad at finding the truth. How many people know Bayes? How many know what confirmation bias is? Anchoring? The Litany of Tarski? Don’t people on this site rail against how low the sanity waterline is? I mean, you don’t disagree that I’m more rational than most Christians and Muslims, right?
Do they do this by using tricks like Multiheaded described? Or by using mystical plants or meditation? (I know there are Christians who think repeating a certain prayer as a mantra and meditating on it for a long time is supposed to work… and isn’t there, or wasn’t there, some Islamic sect where people try to find God by spinning around?) If so, that really doesn’t count. Is there another study where that question was asked? Because if you’re asserting that mystical experiences can be artificially induced by such means in most if not all people, then we’re in agreement.
I was thinking more along the lines of “going to hell is a natural consequence of worshiping Astarte”, analogous to “if I listen to my peers and smoke pot, I won’t be able to sing, whereas if I listen to my mother and drink lots of water, I will; therefore, my mother is right and listening to my peers is bad”. I hadn’t even considered it from that point of view before.
No, I suppose it’s not surprising. I guess I misread the connotations of your claim. Although I am still not certain I agree: I know some very rational and intelligent Christians, and some very rational and intelligent atheists (I don’t really know many Muslims, so I can’t say anything about them). At some point I guess this statement is true by definition, since we can define open-minded as “open-minded enough to convert religion if you have good enough evidence to do so.” But I can’t remember where we were going with this one so I’ll shut up about it.
I was unable to find numerical data on this. I did find some assertions in the surveys that some of the mystical experience was untriggered, I found one study comparing 31 people with triggered mystical experience to 31 people with untriggered mystical experience (suggesting it’s not too hard to get a sample of the latter), and I have heard anecdotes from people I know about having untriggered mystical experience.
Honestly I had never really thought of that as an important difference. Keep in mind that it’s really weird that the brain responds to relatively normal stressors, like fasting or twirling or staying still for two long, by producing this incredible feeling of union with God. Think of how surprising this would be if you weren’t previously aware of it, how complex a behavior this is, as opposed to something simpler like falling unconscious. The brain seems to have this built-in, surprising tendency to have mystical experiences, which can be triggered by a lot of different things.
As someone in the field of medicine, this calls to mind the case of seizures, another unusual mental event which can be triggered in similar conditions. Doctors have this concept called the “seizure threshold”. Some people have low seizure thresholds, other people high seizure thresholds. Various events—taking certain drugs, getting certain diseases, being very stressed, even seeing flashing lights in certain patterns—increases your chance of having a seizure, until it passes your personal seizure threshold and you have one. And then there are some people—your epileptics—who can just have seizures seemingly out of nowhere in the course of everyday life (another example is that some lucky people can induce orgasm at will, whereas most of us only achieve orgasm after certain triggers).
I see mystical experiences as working a lot like seizures—anyone can have one if they experience enough triggers, and some people experience them without any triggers at all. It wouldn’t be at all parsimonous to say that some people have this reaction when they skip a few meals, or stay in the dark, or sit very still, and other people have this reaction when they haven’t done any of these things, but these are caused by two completely different processes.
I mean, if we already know that dreaming up mystical experiences is the sort of thing the brain does in some conditions, it’s a lot easier to expand that to “and it also does that in other conditions” than to say “but if it happens in other conditions, it is proof of God and angels and demons and an entire structure of supernatural entities.”
The (relatively sparse) Biblical evidence suggests an active role of God in creating Hell and damning people to it. For example:
“This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:49)
“Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels!” (Matthew 25:41)
“If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, that person was thrown into the lake of fire.” (Revelations 20:15)
“God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment” (2 Peter 2:4)
“Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” (Luke 12:5)
That last one is particularly, um, pleasant. And it’s part of why it is difficult for me to see a moral superiority of Jehovah over Astarte: of the one who’s torturing people eternally, over the one who fails to inform you that her rival is torturing people eternally.
To return to something I pointed out far, far back in this thread, this is not analagous. Your mother does not cause you to lose your voice for doing the things she advises you not to do. On the other hand, you presumably believe that god created hell, or at a minimum, he tolerates its existence (unless you don’t think God is omnipotent).
(As an aside, another point against the homogeneity you mistakenly assumed you would find on Lesswrong when you first showed up is that not everyone here is a complete moral anti-realist. For me, that one cannot hold the following three premises without contradiction is sufficient to discount any deeper argument for Christianity:
Inflicting suffering is immoral, and inflicting it on an infinite number of people or for an inifinite duration is infinitely immoral
The Christian God is benevolent.
The Christian God allows the existence of Hell.
Resorting to, “Well, I don’t actually know what hell is” is blatant rationalization.)
You don’t actually need to be a moral realist to make that argument; you just need to notice the tension between the set of behavior implied by the Christian God’s traditional attributes and the set of behavior Christian tradition claims for him directly. That in itself implies either a contradiction or some very sketchy use of language (i.e. saying that divine justice allows for infinitely disproportionate retribution).
I think it’s a weakish argument against anything less than a strictly literalist interpretation of the traditions concerning Hell, though. There are versions of the redemption narrative central to Christianity that don’t necessarily involve torturing people for eternity: the simplest one that I know of says that those who die absent a state of grace simply cease to exist (“everlasting life” is used interchangeably with “heaven” in the Bible), although there are interpretations less problematic than that as well.
The (modern) Orthodox opinion that my tutor relayed to us is that Hell isn’t a place at all, but a condition of the soul where it refuses to perceive/accept God’s grace at all and therefore shuts itself out from everything true and meaningful that can be, just wallowing in despair; it exists in literally no-where, as all creation is God’s, and the refusal of God is the very essence of this state. She dismissed all suggestions of sinners’ “torture” in hell—especially by demonic entities—as folk religion.
(Wait, what’s that, looks like either I misquoted her a little or she didn’t quite give the official opinion...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_in_Christian_beliefs#Eastern_Orthodox_concepts_of_hell
I has a confused.
I’ve heard that one too, but I’m not sure how functionally different from pitchforks and brimstone I’d consider it to be, especially in light of the idea of a Last Judgment common to Christianity and Islam.
Oh, there’s a difference alright, one that could be cynically interpreted as an attempt to dodge the issue of cruel and disproportionate punishment by theologians. The version above suggests that God doesn’t ever actively punish anyone at all, He simply refuses to force His way to someone who rejects him, even if they suffer as a result. That’s sometimes assumed to be due to God’s respect for free will.
Yeah. Thing is, we’re dealing with an entity who created the system and has unbounded power within it. Respect for free will is a pretty good excuse, but given that it’s conceivable for a soul to be created that wouldn’t respond with permanent and unspeakable despair to separation from the Christian God (or to the presence of a God whom the soul has rejected, in the other scenario), making souls that way looks, at best, rather irresponsible.
If I remember right the standard response to that is to say that human souls were created to be part of a system with God at its center, but that just raises further questions.
What, so god judges that eternal torture is somehow preferable to violating someones free will by inviting them to eutopia?
I am so tired of theists making their god so unable to be falsified that he becomes useless. Let’s assume for a moment that some form of god actually exists. I don’t care how much he loves us in his own twisted little way, I can think of 100 ways to improve the world and he isn’t doing any of them. It seems to me that we ought to be able to do better than what god has done, and in fact we have.
The standard response to theists postulating a god should be “so what?”.
’s cool, bro, relax. I agree completely with that, I’m just explaining what the other side claims.
Actually, I do. You use the language that rationalists use. However, you don’t seem to have considered very many alternate hypothesis. And you don’t seem to have performed any of the obvious tests to make sure you’re actually getting information out of your evidence.
For instance, you could have just cut up a bunch of similarly formatted stories from different sources, (or even better, have had a third party do it for you, so you don’t see it,) stuck them in a box and pulled them out at random—sorting them into Bible and non-Bible piles according to your feelings. If you were getting the sort of information out that would go some way towards justifying your beliefs, you should easily beat random people of equal familiarity with the Bible.
Rationality is a tool, and if someone doesn’t use it, then it doesn’t matter how good a tool they have; they’re not a rationalist any more than someone who owns a gun is a soldier. Rationalists have to actually go out and gather/analyse the data.
(Edit to change you to someone for clarity’s sake.)
No, I couldn’t have for two reasons. By the time I could have thought of it I would have recognized nearly all the Bible passages as Biblical and to obscure meaning would require such short quotes I’d never be able to tell. Those are things I already explained—you know, in the post where I said we should totally test this, using a similar experiment.
If that’s the stance you’re going to take, it seems destructive to the idea that I should consider you rational. You proposed a test to verify your belief that could not be performed; in the knowledge that, if it was, it would give misleading results.
Minor points: There’s more than just one bible out there. Unless you’re a biblical scholar, the odds that there’s nothing from a bible that you haven’t read are fairly slim.
‘nearly all’ does leave you with some testable evidence. The odds that it just happens to be too short a test for your truth-sensing faculty to work are, I think, fairly slim.
People tend not to have perfect memories. Even if you are a biblical scholar the odds are that you will make mistakes in this, as you would in anything else, and information gained from the intuitive faculty would be expressed as a lower error rate than like-qualified people.
ETA quote.
Similar test. Not the same test. It was a test that, though still flawed, fixed those two things I could see immediately (and in doing so created other problems).
Want to test this?
I don’t see that it would have fixed those things. We could, perhaps, come up with a more useful test if we discussed it on a less hostile footing. But, at the moment, I’m not getting a whole lot of info out of the exchange and don’t think it worth arguing with you over quite why your test wouldn’t work, since we both agree that it wouldn’t.
Not really. It’s not that sort of thing where the outputs of the test would have much value for me. I could easily get 100% of the quotes correct by sticking them into google, as could you. The only answers we could accept with any significant confidence would be the ones we didn’t think the other person was likely to lie about.
My beliefs in respect to claims about the supernatural are held with a high degree of confidence, and pushing them some tiny distance towards the false end of the spectrum is not worth the hours I would have to invest.
If you can say more about why deliberately induced mystical experiences don’t count, but other kinds do, I’d be interested.
For the same reason that if I had a see-an-image-of-Grandpa button, and pushed it, I wouldn’t count the fact that I saw him as evidence that he’s somehow still alive, but if I saw him right now spontaneously, I would.
Imagine that you have a switch in your home which responds to your touch by turning on a lamp (this probably won’t take much imagination). One day this lamp, which was off, suddenly and for no apparent reason turns on. Would you assign supernatural or mundane causes to this event?
Now this isn’t absolute proof that the switch wasn’t turned on by something otherworldly; perhaps it responds to both mundane and supernatural causes. But, well, if I may be blunt, Occam’s Razor. If your best explanations are “the Hand of Zeus” and “Mittens, my cat,” then …
I assume much the same things about this as any other sense: it’s there to give information about the world, but trickable. I mean, how tired you feel is a good measure of how long it’s been since you’ve slept, but you can drink coffee and end up feeling more energetic than is merited. So if I want to be able to tell how much sleep I really need, I should avoid caffeine. That doesn’t mean the existence of caffeine makes your subjective feelings of your own energy level arbitrary or worthless.
Interestingly, this sounds like the way that I used to view my own spiritual experiences. While I can’t claim to have ever had a full-blown vision, I have had powerful, spontaneous feelings associated with prayer and other internal and external religious stimuli. I assumed that God was trying to tell me something. Later, I started to wonder why I was also having these same powerful feelings at odd times clearly not associated with religious experiences, and in situations where there was no message for me as far as I could tell.
On introspection, I realized that I associated this with God because I’d been taught by people at church to identify this “frisson” with spirituality. At the time, it was the most accessible explanation. But there was no other reason for me to believe that explanation over a natural one. That I was getting data that seemed to contradict the “God’s spirit” hypothesis eventually led to an update.
Unfortunately, the example you’re drawing the analogy to is just as unclear to me as the original example I’d requested an explanation of.
I mean, I agree that seeing an image of my dead grandfather isn’t particularly strong evidence that he’s alive. Indeed, I see images of dead relatives on a fairly regular basis, and I continue to believe that they’re dead. But I think that’s equally true whether I deliberately invoked such an image, or didn’t.
I get that you think it is evidence that he’s alive when the image isn’t deliberately invoked, and I can understand how the reason for that would be the same as the reason for thinking that a mystical experience “counts” when it isn’t deliberately invoked, but I am just as unclear about what that reason is as I was to start with.
If I suddenly saw my dead grandpa standing in front of me, that would be sufficiently surprising that I’d want an explanation. It’s not sufficiently strong to make me believe by itself, but I’d say hello and see if he answered, and if he sounded like my grandpa, and then tell him he looks like someone I know and see the reaction, and if he reacts like Grandpa, I touch him to ascertain that he’s corporeal, then invite him to come chat with me until I wake up, and assuming that everything else seems non-dream-like (I’ll eventually have to read something, providing an opportunity to test whether or not I’m dreaming, plus I can try comparing physics to how they should be, perhaps by trying to fly), I’d tell my mom he’s here.
Whereas if I had such a button, I’d ignore the image, because it wouldn’t be surprising. I suppose looking at photographs is kind of like the button.
Well, wait up. Now you’re comparing two conditions with two variables, rather than one.
That is, not only is grandpa spontaneous in case A and button-initiated in case B, but also grandpa is a convincing corporeal fascimile of your grandpa in case A and not any of those things in case B. I totally get how a convincing fascimile of grandpa would “count” where an unconvincing image wouldn’t (and, by analogy, how a convincing mystical experience would count where an unconvincing one wouldn’t) but that wasn’t the claim you started out making.
Suppose you discovered a button that, when pressed, created something standing in front of you that looked like your dead grandpa , sounded and reacted like your grandpa, chatted with you like you believe your grandpa would, etc. Would you ignore that?
It seems like you’re claiming that you would, because it wouldn’t be surprising… from which I infer that mystical experiences have to be surprising to count (which had been my original question, after all). But I’m not sure I properly understood you.
For my own part, if I’m willing to believe that my dead grandpa can come back to life at all, I can’t see why the existence of a button that does this routinely should make me less willing to believe it .
The issue is that there is not a reliable “see-an-image-of-Grandpa button” in existence for mystical experiences. In other words, I’m unaware of any techniques that reliably induce mystical experiences. Since there are no techniques for reliably inducing mystical experiences, there is no basis for rejecting some examples of mystical experience as “unnatural/artificial mystical experiences.”
As an aside, if you are still interested in evaluating readings, I would be interested in your take on this one
Now you’re aware of one.
Yes: Dervishes.
yes
You’ve stated that you judge morality on a consequentialist basis. Now you state that going to hell is somehow not equivalent to god torturing you for eternity. What gives?
Also: You believe in god because your belief in god implies that you really ought to believe in god? What? Is that circular or recursivly justified? If the latter, please explain.
Hidden cameras help. So do setups like “leave a dollar, take a bagel” left in the office kitchen.
That’s a great idea! Now if only we could randomly assign people to convert to either Wicca or Christianity, we’d be all set. Unfortunately...
It’s not exactly rigorous, but you could try leaving bagels at Christian and Wiccan gatherings of approximately the same size and see how many dollars you get back.
That’s an idea, but you’d need to know how they started out. If generally nice people joined one religion and stayed the same, and generally horrible people joined the other and became better people, they might look the same on the bagel test.
True. You could control for that by seeing if established communities are more or less prone to stealing bagels than younger ones, but that would take a lot more data points.
Indeed. Or you could test the people themselves individually. What if you got a bunch of very new converts to various religions, possibly more than just Christianity and Wicca, and tested them on the bagels and gave them a questionnaire containing some questions about morals and some about their conversion and some decoys to throw them off, then called them back again every year for the same tests, repeating for several years?
I don’t really trust self-evaluation for questions like this, unfortunately—it’s too likely to be confounded by people’s moral self-image, which is exactly the sort of thing I’d expect to be affected by a religious conversion. Bagels would still work, though.
Actually, if I was designing a study like this I think I’d sign a bunch of people up ostensibly for longitudial evaluation on a completely different topic—and leave a basket of bagels in the waiting room.
What about a study ostensibly of the health of people who convert to new religions? Bagels in the waiting room, new converts, random not-too-unpleasant medical tests for no real reason? Repeat yearly?
The moral questionnaire would be interesting because people’s own conscious ethics might reflect something cool and if you’re gonna test it anyway… but on the other hand, yeah. I don’t trust them to evaluate how moral they are, either. But if people signal what they believe is right, then that means you do know what they think is good. You could use that to see a shift from no morals at all to believing morals are right and good to have. And just out of curiosity, I’d like to see if they shifted from deontologist to consequentialist ethics, or vice versa.
Yeah, that all sounds good to me.
People don’t necessarily signal what they think is right; sometimes they signal attitudes they think other people want them to possess. Admittedly, in a homogenous environment that can cause people to eventually endorse what they’ve been signaling.
Hm, you’d probably want the bagels to be off in a small side room so that the patients can feel alone while considering whether or not to steal one.
Yes, definitely. Or in a waiting room. “Oops, sorry, we’re running a little late. Wait here in this deserted waiting room till five minutes from now, bye. :)” Otherwise, they might not see them.
Or perhaps neither Jehovah nor Astarte knows now who will dominate in the end, and any promises either makes to any followers are, ahem, over-confident? :-) There was a line I read somewhere about how all generals tell their troops that their side will be victorious...
So you’re assuming both sides are in a duel, and that the winner will send xyr worshipers to heaven and the loser’s worshipers to hell? Because I was not.
Only Jehovah. He says that he’s going to send his worshipers to heaven and Astarte’s to hell. Astarte says neither Jehovah nor she will send anyone anywhere. Either one could be a liar, or they could be in a duel and each describing what happens if xe wins.
Only as a hypothetical possibility. (From such evidence as I’ve seen I don’t think either really exists. And I have seen a fair number of Wiccan ceremonies—which seem like reasonably decent theater, but that’s all.) One could construe some biblical passages as predicting some sort of duel—and if one believed those passages, and that interpretation, then the question of whether one side was overstating its chances would be relevant.
Maybe I’m lacking context, but I’m not sure why you bring this up. Has anyone here described religious beliefs as being characteristically caused by mental illness? I’d be concerned if they had, since such a statement would be (a) incorrect and (b) stigmatizing.
In this post, Eliezer characterized John C. Wright’s conversion to Catholicism as the result of a temporal lobe epileptic fit and said that at least some (not sure if he meant all) religious experiences were “brain malfunctions.”
Interesting that this post has been downvoted. Care to explain? It seems to me that I am straightforwardly answering a question.
The relevant category is probably not explanations for religious beliefs, but rather explanations of experiences such as AK has reported of what, for lack of a better term, I will call extrasensory perception. Most of the people I know who have religious beliefs don’t report extrasensory perception, and most of the people I know who report extrasensory perception don’t have religious beliefs. (Though of the people I know who do both, a reasonable number ascribe a causal relationship between them. The direction varies.)
You are. That’s the main alternate explanation I can think of.
But, mental illness is not required to experience strong, odd feelings or even to “hear voices”. Fully-functional human brains can easily generate such things.
Religious experience isn’t usually pathologized in the mainstream (academically or by laypeople) unless it makes up part of a larger pattern of experience that’s disruptive to normal life, but that doesn’t say much one way or another about LW’s attitude toward it.
My experience with LW’s attitude has been similar, though owing to a different reason. Religion generally seems to be treated here as the result of cognitive bias, same as any number of other poorly setup beliefs.
Though LW does tend to use the word “insane” in a way that includes any kind of irrational cognition, I so far have interpreted that to mostly be slang, not meant to literally imply that all irrational cognition is mental illness (although the symptoms of many mental illnesses can be seen as a subset of irrational cognition).
Not having certain irrational biases can be said to be a subset of mental illness.
How so? I can only think of Straw Vulcan examples. (Or, by “can be said”, do you mean to imply that you disagree with the statement?)
A subset of those diagnosed or diagnosable with high functioning autism and a subset of the features that constitute that label fit this category. Being rational is not normal.
I don’t affiliate myself with the DSM, nor does it always representative of an optimal way of carving reality. In this case I didn’t want to specify one way or the other.
Things like more accurate self-evaluations by depressed people.
tl;dr for the last two comments (Just to help me understand this; if I misrepresent anyone, please call me out on it.)
Yvain: So you believe in multiple factions of supernatural beings, why do you think Jehovah is the benevolent side? Other gods have done awesomecool stuff too, and Jehovah’s known to do downright evil stuff.
AK: Not multiple factions, just two. As to why I think Jehovah’s the good guy.....
Don’t you think that’s an unjustified nitpick? Absolutely awful people are rare, people who have revelations are rarer, so obviously absolutely awful people who had revelations have to be extremely difficult to find. So it’s not really surprising that two links someone gave you don’t mention a story like that.
But I think you’re assuming that the hallmark of a true religion is that it drastically increases the morality of its adherents. And that’s an assumption you have no grounds for—all that happened in your case was that the needle of your moral compass swerved from ‘absolute scumbag’ to ‘reasonably nice person’. There’s no reason to generalise that and believe that the moral compass of a reasonably nice person would swerve further to ‘absolute saint’.
Anyhow, your testable prediction is ‘converts to false religions won’t show moral improvement’. I doubt there’s any data on stuff like that right now (if there is, my apologies), so we have to rely on anecdotal evidence. The problem with that, of course, is that it’s notoriously unreliable… If it doesn’t show what you want it to show, you can just dismiss it all as lies or outliers or whatever. Doesn’t really answer any questions.
And if you’re willing to consider that kind of anecdotal evidence, why not other kinds of anecdotal evidence that sound just as convincing?
How convenient. When it happens to someone else it’s a lie/delusion/hallucination, when it happens to you it’s a miracle.
And yet.… Back to your premise. Even if your personality changed for the better… How does this show in any way that Jehovah’s a good guy? Surely even an evil daemon has no use for social outcasts with a propensity for random acts of violence; a normal person would probably serve them better. And how do you answer Yvain’s point about all the evil Jehovah has done? How do you know he’s the good guy
....
Everyone else: Why are we playing the “let’s assume everything you say is true” game anyway? Surely it’d be more honest to try and establish that his mystical experiences were all hallucinations?
We’ll have to ask how God and Santa Claus manage to pull it off.
I prefer TheOtherDave’s idea. Unlike God, we’re not omniscient or capable of reading minds. And unlike Santa Claus, we exist.
Well, now that you mention it… I infer that if you read someone’s user page and got sensation A or B off of it, you would consider that evidence about the user’s morality. Yes? No?
Yes. But it would be more credible to other people, and make for a publishable study, if we used some other measure. It’d also be more certain that we’d actually get information.
Indeed, non-omniscience and fictitious nature seem like huge flaws in my plan.
Obviously I can’t speak for AK, but maybe she believes that she has been epistemically lucky. Compare the religious case:
“I had this experience which gave me evidence for divinity X, so I am going to believe in X. Others have had analogous experiences for divinities Y and Z, but according to the X religion I adopted those are demonic, so Y and Z believers are wrong. I was lucky though, since if I had had a Y experience I would have become a Y believer”.
with philosophical cases like the ones Alicorn discusses there:
“I accept philosophical position X because of compelling arguments I have been exposed to. Others have been exposed to seemingly compelling arguments for positions Y and Z, but according to X these arguments are flawed, so Y and Z believers are wrong. I was lucky though, since if I had gone to a university with Y teachers I would have become a Y believer”.
It may be that the philosopher is also being irrational here and that she could strive more to trascend her education and assess X vs Y impartially, but in the end it is impossible to escape this kind of irrationality at all levels at once and assess beliefs from a perfect vaccuum. We all find some things compelling and not others because of the kind of people we are and the kind of lives we have lived, and the best we can get is reflective equilibrium. Recursive justification hitting bottom and all that.
The question is whether AK is already in reflective equilibrium or if she can still profit from some meta-examination and reassess this part of her belief system. (I believe that some religious believers have reflected enough about their beliefs and the counterarguments to them that they are in this kind of equilibrium and there is no further argument from an atheist that can rationally move them—though these are a minority and not representative of typical religious folks.)
See my response here—if Alicorn is saying she knows the other side has arguments exactly as convincing as those which led her to her side, but she is still justified to continue believing her side more likely than the other, I disagree with her.
You’re doing it wrong. The power of the Litany comes from evidence. Every time you applying the Litany of Gendlin to an unsubstantiated assertion, a fairie drops dead.
I think this is a joke, ish, right? Because it’s quite witty. /tangent
I mentioned some evidence elsewhere in the thread.
“Ish,” yes. I have to admit I’ve had a hard time navigating this enormous thread, and haven’t read all of it, including the evidence of demonic influence you’re referring to. However, I predict in advance that 1) this evidence is based on words that a man wrote in an ancient book, and that 2) I will find this evidence dubious.
Two equally unlikely propositions should require equally strong evidence to be believed. Neither dragons nor demons exist, yet you assert that demons are real. Where, then, is the chain of entangled events leading from the state of the universe to the state of your mind? Honest truth-seeking is about dispassionately scrutinizing that chain, as an outsider would, and allowing others to scrutinize, evaluate, and verify it.
I was a Mormon missionary at 19. I used to give people copies of the Book of Mormon, testify of my conviction that it was true, and invite them to read it and pray about it. A few did (Most people in Iowa and Illinois aren’t particularly vulnerable to Mormonism). A few of those people eventually (usually after meeting with us several times) came to feel as I did, that the book was true. I told those people that the feeling they felt was the Holy Spirit, manifesting the truth to them. And if that book is true, I told them, then Joseph Smith must have been a true prophet. And as a true prophet, the church that he established must be the Only True Church, according to Joseph’s revelations and teachings. I would then invite them to be baptized (which was the most important metric in the mission), and to become a member of the LDS church. One of the church’s teachings is that a person can become as God after death (omniscience and omnipotence included). Did the chain of reasoning leading from “I have a feeling that this book is true” justify the belief that “I can become like God”?
You are intelligent and capable of making good rhetorical arguments (from what I have read of your posts in the last week or two). I see you wielding Gendlin, for example, in support of your views. At some level, you’re getting it. But the point of Gendlin is to encourage truth-seekers desiring to cast off comforting false beliefs. It works properly only if you are also willing to invoke Tarski:
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Upvoted for being a completely reasonable comment given that you haven’t read through the entirety of a thread that’s gotten totally monstrous.
Only partly right.
Of course you will. If I told you that God himself appeared to me personally and told me everything in the Bible was true, you’d find that dubious, too. Perhaps even more dubious.
Already partly in other posts on this thread (actually largely in other posts on this thread), buried somewhere, among something. You’ll forgive me for not wanting to retype multiple pages, I hope.
Certainly. I’m now curious though: if I told you that God appeared to me personally and told me everything in the Bible was true (either for some specific meaning of “the Bible,” which is of course an ambiguous phrase, or leaving it not further specified), roughly how much confidence would you have that I was telling you the truth?
It would depend on how you said it—as a joke, or as an explanation for why you suddenly believed in God and had decided to convert to Christianity, or as a puzzling experience that you were trying to figure out, or something else—and whether it was April 1 or not, and what you meant by “the Bible” (whether you specified it or not), and how you described God and the vision and your plans for the future.
But I’d take it with a grain of salt. I’d probably investigate further and continue correspondence with you for some time, both to help you as well as I could and to ascertain with more certainty the source of your belief that God came to you (whether he really did or it was a drug-induced hallucination or something). It would not be something I’d bet on either way, at least not just from hearing it said.
Ah, apologies if I’ve completely missed the point (which is entirely possible).
No, but generally, applying a derogatory epithet to an entire group of people is seen as rude, unless you back it up with evidence, which in this case you did not do. You just stated it.
In his afterword, EY seems to be saying that the benign actions of his friends and family are inconsistent with the malicious actions of YHVH, as he is depicted in Exodus. This is different from flat-out stating, “all theists are evil” and leaving it at that. EY is offering evidence for his position, and he is also giving credit to theists for being good people despite their religion (as he sees it).
I can’t speak for “you guys”, only for myself; and I personally don’t think that your beliefs are particularly offensive, just the manner in which you’re stating them. It’s kind of like the difference between saying, “Christianity is wrong because Jesus is a fairytale and all Christians are idiots for believing it”, versus, “I believe that Christians are mistaken because of reasons X, Y and Z”.
Well, personally, I believe its wrong because no gods or demons of any kind exist.
Wiccans, on the other hand, would probably tell you that you’re wrong because Wicca had made them better people, who are more loving, selfless, and considerate of others, which is inconsistent with the expected result of worshiping evil demons. I can’t speak for all Wiccans, obviously; this is just what I’d personally heard some Wiccans say.
I object to the use of social politics to overwhelm assertions of fact. Christians and Wiccan’s obviously find each other offensive rather frequently. Both groups (particularly the former) probably also find me offensive. In all cases I say that is their problem.
Now if the Christians were burning the witches I might consider it appropriate to intervene forcefully...
Incidentally I wouldn’t have objected if you responded to “They consort with demons” with “What a load of bullshit. Get a clue!”
I was really objecting to the unsupported assertion; I wouldn’t have minded if AK said, “they consort with demons, and here’s the evidence”.
Well, I personally do fully endorse that statement, but the existence of gods and demons is a matter of faith, or of personal experience, and thus whatever evidence or reason I can bring to bear in support of my statement is bound to be unpersuasive.
Off-topic nitpick: I like to be called a demon-worshiper.
You’re a demon-worshipper!
Oh the innuendo. At this point in the thread, I guess the only way to make the depravity more exquisite would be if you said you enjoy being called a demon’s consort. 0_0
Would a constructor of asynchronous process-level parallel structures be a daemon wrangler?
Fair enough :-)
Well if the entities Wiccans worship actually did exist rather than in a lame memetic or trick of psychology way… it is very unlikely they would be benign. Same could be said of many other religions.
Okay, I’ll bite. On what basis do you conclude that the entities that modern day wiccans worship are demonic, rather than simply imaginary?
Because the religion is evil rather than misguided. Whereas, say, Hinduism, for instance, is just really misguided. See other conversation. Also see Exodus 22:18 and Deuteronomy 18:10.
(I wish I had predicted that this would end this way before I answered that post… then I might not have done so.)
OK, last one from me, if you’re still up for it.
There is nothing that you can claim, nothing that you can demand, nothing that you can take. And as soon as you try to take something as if it were your own—you lose your [innocence]. The angel with the flaming sword stands armed against all selfhood that is small and particular, against the “I” that can say “I want...” “I need...” “I demand...” No individual enters Paradise, only the integrity of the Person.
Only the greatest humility can give us the instinctive delicacy and caution that will prevent us from reaching out for pleasures and satisfactions that we can understand and savor in this darkness. The moment we demand anything for ourselves or even trust in any action of our own to procure a deeper intensification of this pure and serene rest in [God], we defile and dissipate the perfect gift that [He] desires to communicate to us in the silence and repose of our own powers.
If there is one thing we must do it is this: we must realize to the very depths of our being that this is a pure gift of [God] which no desire, no effort and no heroism of ours can do anything to deserve or obtain. There is nothing we can do directly either to procure it or to preserve it or to increase it. Our own activity is for the most part an obstacle to the infusion of this peaceful and pacifying light, with the exception that [God] may demand certain acts and works of us by charity or obedience, and maintain us in deep experimental union with [Him] through them all, by [His] own good pleasure, not by any fidelity of ours.
At best we can dispose ourselves for the reception of this great gift by resting in the heart of our own poverty, keeping our soul as far as possible empty of desires for all the things that please and preoccupy our nature, no matter how pure or sublime they may be in themselves.
And when [God] reveals [Himself] to us in contemplation we must accept [Him] as [He] comes to us, in [His] own obscurity, in [His] own silence, not interrupting [Him] with arguments or words, conceptions or activities that belong to the level of our own tedious and labored existence.
We must respond to [God]’s gifts gladly and freely with thanksgiving, happiness and joy; but in contemplation we thank [Him] less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. … It is our emptiness in the presence of the abyss of [His] reality, our silence in the presence of [His] infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which [His] light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises [Him]. It is this that causes love of [God] and wonder and adoration to swim up into us like tidal waves out of the depths of that peace, and break upon the shores of our consciousness in a vast, hushed surf of inarticulate praise, praise and glory!
(I might fail to communicate clearly with this comment; if so, my apologies, it’s not purposeful. E.g. normally if I said “Thomistic metaphysical God” I would assume the reader either knew what I meant (were willing to Google “Thomism”, say) or wasn’t worth talking to. I’ll try not to do that kind of thing in this comment as badly as I normally do. I’m also honestly somewhat confused about a lot of Catholic doctrine and so my comment will likely be confused as a result. To make things worse I only feel as if I’m thinking clearly if I can think about things in terms of theoretical computer science, particularly algorithmic probability theory; unfortunately not only is it difficult to translate ideas into those conceptual schemes, those conceptual schemes are themselves flawed (e.g. due to possibilities of hypercomputation and fundamental problems with probability that’ve been unearthed by decision theory). So again, my apologies if the following is unclear.)
I’m going to accept your interpretation at face value, i.e. accept that you’re blessed with a supernatural charisma or something like that. That said, I’m not yet sure I buy the idea that the Thomistic metaphysical God, the sole optimal decision theory, the Form of the Good, the Logos-y thing, has much to do with transhumanly intelligent angels and demons of roughly the sort that folk around here would call superintelligences. (I haven’t yet read the literature on that subject.) In my current state of knowledge if I was getting supernatural signals (which I do, but not as regularly as you do) then I would treat them the same way I’d treat a source of information that claimed to be Chaitin’s constant: skeptically.
In fact it might not be a surface-level analogy to say that God is Chaitin’s omega (and is thus a Turing oracle), for they would seem to share a surprising number of properties. Of course Chaitin’s constant isn’t computable, so there’s no algorithmic way to check if the signals you’re getting come from God or from a demon that wants you to think it’s God (at least for claimed bits of Chaitin’s omega that you don’t already know). I believe the Christians have various arguments about states of mind that protect you from demonic influences like that; I haven’t read this article on infallibility yet but I suspect it’s informative.
Because there doesn’t seem to be an algorithmic way of checking if God is really God rather than any other agent that has more bits of Chaitin’s constant than you do, you’re left in a situation where you have to have what is called faith, I think. (I do not understand Aquinas’s arguments about faith yet; I’m not entirely sure I know what it is. I find the ideas counter-intuitive.) I believe that Catholics and maybe other Christians say that conscience is something like a gift from God and that you can trust it, so if your conscience objects to the signals you’re getting then that at least a red flag that you might be being influenced by self-delusion or demons or what have you. But this “conscience” thing seems to be algorithmic in nature (though that’s admittedly quite a contentious point), so if it can check the truth value of the moral information you’re getting supernaturally then you already had those bits of Chaitin’s constant. If your conscience doesn’t say anything about it then it would seem you’re dealing with a situation where you’re supposed/have to have faith. That’s the only way you can do better than an algorithmic approach.
Note that part of the reasons that I think about these things is ’cuz I want my FAI to be able to use bits of Chaitin’s constant that it finds in its environment so as to do uncomputable things it otherwise wouldn’t have. It is an extension of this same personal problem of what to do with information whose origin you can’t algorithmicly verify.
Anyway it’s a sort of awkward situation to be in. It seems natural to assume that this agent is God but I’m not sure if that is acceptable by the standard of (Kant’s weirdly naive version of) Kan’t categorical imperative. I notice that I am very confused about counterfactual states of knowledge and various other things that make thinking about this very difficult.
So um, how do you approach the problem? Er did I even describe the problem in such a way that it’s understandable?
I don’t think I’m smart enough to follow this comment. Edit: but I think you’re wrong about me having some sort of supernatural charisma… I’m pretty sure I haven’t said I’m special, because if I did, I’d be wrong.
Hm, so how would you describe the mechanism behind your sensations then? (Sorry, I’d been primed to interpret your description in light of similar things I’d seen before which I would describe as “supernatural” for lack of a better word.)
...I wasn’t going to come back to say anything, but fine. I’d say it’s God’s doing. Not my own specialness. And I’m not going to continue this conversation further.
Okay, thanks. I didn’t mean to imply ’twas your own “specialness” as such; apologies for being unclear. ETA: Also I’m sorry for anything else? I get the impression I did/said something wrong. So yeah, sorry.
FWIW, apparently (per Wikipedia) the word “charism” “denotes any good gift that flows from God’s love to man.”
The dirt just sits there? It doesn’t also squeeze your skin? Or instead throb as if it had been squeezed for a while, but uniformly, not with a tourniquet, and was just released?
Just sits there. Anyway, dirt is a bad metaphor.
Oh and also you should definitely look into using this to help build/invoke FAI/God. E.g. my prospective team has a slot open which you might be perfect for. I’m currently affiliated with Leverage Research who recently received a large donation from Jaan Tallinn, who also supports the Singularity Institute.
I’m not convinced that this is an accurate perception of AspiringKnitter’s comments here so far.
E.g., I don’t think she’s yet claimed both omnipotence and omnibenevolence as attributes of god, so you may be criticizing views she doesn’t hold. If there’s a comment I missed, then ignore me. :)
But at a minimum, I think you misunderstood what she was asking by, “Do you mean that I can’t consider his nonexistence as a counterfactual?” She was asking, by my reading, if you thought she had displayed an actual incapability of thinking that thought.
.
If you’re granted “fictional”, then no. But if you don’t believe in unicorns, you’d better mean “magical horse with a horn” and not “narwhal” or “rhinoceros”.
For what it’s worth, the downvotes appear to be correlated with anyone discussing theology. Not directed at you in particular. At least, that’s my impression.
You do realize it might very well mean death to your Bayes score to say or think things like that around an omnipotent being who has a sense of humor, right? This is the sort of Dude Who wrestles with a mortal then names a nation to honor the match just to taunt future wannabe-Platonist Jews about how totally crazy their God is. He is perfectly capable of engineering some lucky socks just so He can make fun of you about it later. He’s that type of Guy. And you do realize that the generalization of Bayes score to decision theoretic contexts with objective morality is actually a direct measure of sinfulness? And that the only reason you’re getting off the hook is that Jesus allegedly managed to have a generalized Bayes score of zero despite being unable to tell a live fig tree from a dead one at a moderate distance and getting all pissed off about it for no immediately discernible reason? Just sayin’, count your blessings.
Yes, of course. Why he’d do that, instead of all the other things he could be doing, like creating a lucky hat or sending a prophet to explain the difference between “please don’t be an idiot and quibble over whether it might hurt my feelings if you tell me the truth” and “please be as insulting as possible in your dealings with me”.
No, largely because I have no idea what that would even mean. However, if you mean that using good epistemic hygiene is a sin because there’s objective morality, or if you think the objective morality only applies in certain situations which require special epistemology to handle, you’re wrong.
It’s just that now “lucky socks” is the local Schelling point. It’s possible I don’t understand God very well, but I personally am modally afraid of jinxing stuff or setting myself up for dramatic irony. It has to do with how my personal history’s played out. I was mostly just using the socks thing as an example of this larger problem of how epistemology gets harder when there’s a very powerful entity around. I know I have a really hard time predicting the future because I’m used to… “miracles” occurring and helping me out, but I don’t want to take them for granted, but I want to make accurate predictions… And so on. Maybe I’m over-complicating things.
Okay, I can understand that. It can be annoying. However, the standard framework does still apply; you can still use Bayes. It’s like anything else confusing you.
I see what you’re saying and it’s a sensible approximation but I’m not actually sure you can use Bayes in situations with “mutual simulation” like that. Are you familiar with updateless/ambient decision theory perchance?
No, I’m not. Should I be? Do you have a link to offer?
This post combined with all the comments is perhaps the best place to start, or this post might be an easier introduction to the sorts of problems that Bayes has trouble with. This is the LW wiki hub for decision theory. That said it would take me awhile to explain why I think it’d particularly interest you and how it’s related to things like lucky socks, especially as a lot of the most interesting ideas are still highly speculative. I’d like to write such an explanation at some point but can’t at the moment.
Welcome to Less Wrong ! Heh heh.
...and they can say exactly the same thing about you. It’s exactly that symmetry that defines No True Scotsman. You think you are reading and applying the text correctly, they think they are. It doesn’t help to insist that you’re really right and they’re really wrong, because they can do the same thing.
No, No True Scotsman is characterized by moveable goalposts. If you actually do have a definition of True Scotsman that you can point to and won’t change, then you’re not going to fall under this fallacy.
Okay, I’m confused here. Do you believe there are potentially correct and incorrect answers to the question “what does the Bible say that Jesus taught while alive?”
IMO, most Christians unconsciously concentrate on the passages that match their preconceptions, and ignore or explain away the rest. This behavior is ridiculously easy to notice in others, and equally difficult to notice in oneself.
For example, I expect you to ignore or explain away Matthew 10:34: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
I expect you find Mark 11:12-14 rather bewildering: “On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.””
I still think Luke 14:26 has a moderately good explanation behind it, but there’s also a good chance that this is a verse I’m still explaining away, even though I’m not a Christian any more and don’t need to: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
The bible was authored by different individuals over the course of time. That’s pretty well established. Those individuals had different motives and goals. IMO, this causes there to actually be competing strains of thought in the bible. People pick out the strains of thought that speak to their preconceived notions. For one last example, I expect you’ll explain James in light of Ephesians, arguing that grace is the main theme. But I think it’s equally valid for someone to explain Ephesians in light of James, arguing that changed behavior is the main theme. These are both valid approaches, in my mind, because contrary to the expectations of Christians (who believe that deep down, James and Ephesians must be saying the same thing), James and Ephesians are actually opposing view points.
Finally, I’ll answer your question: probably not. Not every collection of words has an objective meaning. Restricting yourself to the gospels helps a lot, but I still think they are ambiguous enough to support multiple interpretations.
That isn’t a tacked on addition. It’s the core principle of the entire faith!
Well, lavalamp_2008 vigorously agrees with you, anyway...
The way I see it, there appear to be enough contradictions and ambiguities in the Bible and associated fan work that it’s possible to use it to justify almost anything. (Including slavery.) So it’s hard to tell a priori what’s un-Christian and what isn’t.
Against a Biblical literalist, this would probably be a pretty good attack—if you think a plausible implication of a single verse in the Bible, taken out of context, is an absolute moral justification for a proposed action, then, yes, you can justify pretty much any behavior.
However, this does not seem to be the thrust of AspiringKnitter’s point, nor, even if it were, should we be content to argue against such a rhetorically weak position.
Rather, I think AspiringKnitter is arguing that certain emotions, attitudes, dispositions, etc. are repeated often enough and forcefully enough in the Bible so as to carve out an identifiable cluster in thing-space. A kind, gentle, equalitarian pacifist is (among other things) acting more consistently with the teachings of the literary character of Jesus than a judgmental, aggressive, elitist warrior. Assessing whether someone is acting consistently with the literary character of Jesus’s teachings is an inherently subjective enterprise, but that doesn’t mean that all opinions on the subject are equally valid—there is some content there.
You have a good point there.
Then again, there are plenty of times that Jesus says things to the effect of “Repent sinners, because the end is coming, and God and I are gonna kick your ass if you don’t!”
-- Sam Harris
Sacrifice other people’s wives to the devil. That’s almost certainly out.
Yes, that’s a significant moral absurdity to us but no a big deal to the cultures who created the religion or to the texts themselves. (Fairly ambivalent—mostly just supports following whatever is the status quo on the subject.)
No, it’s really not. There is plenty of grey but there are a whole lot of clear cut rules too. Murdering. Stealing. Grabbing guys by the testicles when they are fighting. All sorts of things.
Your comment seems to be about a general trend and doesn’t rest on slavery itself, correct?
Because if not, I just want to point out that the Bible never says “slavery is good”. It regulates it, ensuring minimal rights for slaves, and assumes it will happen, which is kind of like the rationale behind legalizing drugs. Slaves are commanded in the New Testament to obey their masters, which those telling them to do so explain as being so that the faith doesn’t get a bad reputation. The only time anyone’s told to practice slavery is as punishment for a crime, which is surely no worse than incarceration. At least you’re getting some extra work done.
I assume this doesn’t change your mind because you have other examples in mind?
One thing that struck me about the Bible when I first read it was that Jesus never flat-out said, “look guys, owning people is wrong, don’t do it”. Instead, he (as you pointed out) treats slavery as a basic fact of life, sort of like breathing or language or agriculture. There are a lot of parables in the New Testament which use slavery as a plot device, or as an analogy to illustrate a point, but none that imagine a world without it.
Contrast this to the modern world we live in. To most of us, slavery is almost unthinkable, and we condemn it whenever we see it. As imperfect as we are, we’ve come a long way in the past 2000 years—all of us, even Christians. That’s something to be proud of, IMO.
Hrm, I support legalizing-and-regulating (at least some) drugs and am not in favor of legalizing-and-regulating slavery. I just thought about it for 5 minutes and I still really don’t think they are analogous.
Deciding factor: sane, controlled drug use does not harm anyone (with the possible exception of the user, but they do so willingly). “sane, controlled” slavery would still harm someone against their will (with the exception of voluntary BDSM type relationships, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what we’re talking about).
Do you support legalizing and regulating the imprisonment of people against their will?
Haha, I did think of that before making my last comment :)
Answer: in cases where said people are likely to harm others, yes. IMO, society gains more utilons from incarcerating them than the individuals lose from being incarcerated. Otherwise, I’d much rather see more constructive forms of punishment.
OK. So, consider a proposal to force prisoners to perform involuntary labor, in such a way that society gains more utilons from that labor than the individuals lose from being forced to perform it.
Would you support that proposal?
Would you label that proposal “slavery”?
If not (to either or both), why not?
It would probably depend on the specific proposal. I’d lean more towards “no” the more involuntary and demeaning the task. (I’m not certain my values are consistent here; I haven’t put huge amounts of thought into it.)
Not in the sense I thought we were talking about, which (at least in my mind) included the concept of one individual “owning” another. In a more general sense, I guess yes.
Well, for my own part I would consider a system of involuntary forced labor as good an example of slavery as I can think of… to be told “yes, you have to work at what I tell you to work at, and you have no choice in the matter, but at least I don’t own you” would be bewildering.
That said, I don’t care about the semantics very much. But if the deciding factor in your opposition to legalizing and regulating slavery is that slavery harms someone against their will, then it seems strange to me that who owns whom is relevant here. Is ownership in and of itself a form of harm?
Tabooing “slavery”: “You committed crimes and society has deemed that you will perform task X for Y years as a repayment” seems significantly different (to me) from “You were kidnapped from country Z, sold to plantation owner W and must perform task X for the rest of your life”. I can see arguments for and against the former, but the latter is just plain evil.
This actually understates the degree of difference. Chattel slavery isn’t simply about involuntary labor. It also involves, for example, lacking the autonomy to marry without the consent of one’s master, the arbitrary separation of families and the selling of slaves’ children, etc.
Sure, I agree. But unless the latter is what’s being referred to Biblically, we do seem to have shifted the topic of conversation somewhere along the line.
It’s been awhile since I read it last, but IIRC, the laws regarding slavery in the OT cover individuals captured in a war as well as those sold into slavery to pay a debt.
That’s consistent with my recollection as well.
Does each and every feature of slavery need to contribute to it’s awfulness?
Certainly not.
In fact, often taking slaves is outright sinful. (Because you’re supposed to genocide them instead! :P)
That’s certainly the Old Testament position (i.e. the Amalekites). But I don’t that it’s fair to say that is an inherent part of Christian thought.
I don’t think “take slaves as punishment” is inherent Christian thought either.
I would confirm this with a particular emphasis on schizophrenia. Actually not quite—as I understand it there is a negative correlation.
Is this a “Catholics aren’t Christian” thing, or just drawing attention to the point that not all Christians are Catholic?
The latter.
Alright. I’ve encountered some people of the former opinion, and while it really didn’t square with the impression you’ve given thusfar I would have been interested to see your reasoning if you’d in fact held that view.
Hmm, so apparently, looking up religious conversion testimonies on the intertubes is more difficult than I thought, because all the top search results lead to sites that basically say, “here’s why religion X is wrong and my own religion Y is the best thing since sliced bread”. That said, here’s a random compilation of Chrtistianity-to-Islam conversion testimonials. You can also check out the daily “Why am I an Atheist” feature on Pharyngula, but be advised that this site is quite a bit more angry than Less Wrong, so the posts may not be representative.
BTW, I’m not endorsing any of these testimonials, I’m just pointing out that they do exist.
Well, I brought that up because I know of at least one mental illness-related violent incident in my own extended family. That said, you are probably right in saying that schizophrenia and violence are not strongly correlated. However, note that violence against others was just one of the negative effects I’d brought up; existential risk to one’s self was another.
I think they key disagreement we’re having is along the following lines: is it better to believe in something that’s true, or in something that’s probably false, but has a positive effect on you as a person ? I believe that the second choice will actually result in a lower utility. Am I correct in thinking that you disagree ? If so, I can elaborate on my position.
I don’t think there are many people (outside of upper management, maybe, heh), of any religious denomination or lack thereof, who wake up every morning and say to themselves, “man, I really want to fulfill some selfish desires today, and other people can go suck it”. Though, in a trivial sense, I suppose that one can interpret wanting to be nice to people as a selfish desire, as well...
You keep asserting things like this, but to an atheist, or an adherent of any faith other than yours, these assertions are pretty close to null statements—unless you can back them up with some evidence that is independent of faith.
Every single person (plus or minus epsilon) who calls oneself “Christian” claims to “follow Jesus’s teachings”; but all Christians disagree on what “following Jesus’s teachings” actually means, so your test is not objective. All those Christians who want to persecute gay people, ban abortion, teach Creationism in schools, or even merely follow the Pope and venerate Mary—all of them believe that they are doing what Jesus would’ve wanted them to do, and they can quote Bible verses to prove it.
Some Christians claim that this story is a later addition to the Bible and therefore non-authoritative. I should also mention that both YHVH and, to a lesser extent, Jesus, did some pretty intolerant things; such as committing wholesale genocide, whipping people, condemning people, authorizing slavery, etc. The Bible is quite a large book...
Thank you.
I’m sorry.
No, I don’t think that’s true, because it’s better to believe what’s true.
So do I, because of the utility I assign to being right.
No.
Suppose, hypothetically, that current LessWrong trends of adding rituals and treating EY as to some extent above others continue. And then suppose that decades or centuries down the line, we haven’t got transhumanism, but we HAVE got LessWrongians who now argue about what EY really meant. And some of them disagree with each other, and others outside their community just raise their eyebrows and think man, LessWrongians are such a weird cult. Would it be correct, at least, to say that there’s a correct answer to the question “who is following Eliezer Yudkowsky’s teachings?” That there’s a yes or no answer to the question “did EY advocate prisons just because he failed to speak out against them?” Or to the question “would he have disapproved of people being irrational?” If not, I’ll admit you’re being self-consistent, at least.
And that claim should be settled by studying the relevant history.
EDIT: oh, and I forgot to mention that one doesn’t have to actually think “I want to go around fulfilling my selfish desires” so much as just have a utility function that values only one’s own comfort and not other people’s.
This statement appears to contradict your earlier statements that
a). It’s better to live with the perception-altering symptoms of schizophrenia, than to replace those symptoms with depression and other side-effects, and
b). You determine the nature of every “gut feeling” (i.e., whether it is divine or internal) by using multiple criteria, one of which is, “would I be better off as a person if this feeling was, in fact, divine”.
I hope not, I think people are engaging in more than enough EY-worship as it is, but that’s beside the point...
Since we know today that EY actually existed, and what he talked about, then yes. However, this won’t be terribly relevant in the distant future, for several reasons:
Even though everyone would have an answer to this question, it is far from guaranteed that more than zero answers would be correct, because it’s entirely possible that no Yudkowskian sect would have the right answer.
Our descendants likely won’t have access to EY’s original texts, but to Swahili translations from garbled Chinese transcriptions, or something; it’s possible that the translations would reflect the translators’ preferences more than EY’s original intent. In this case, EY’s original teachings would be rendered effectively inaccessible, and thus the question would become unanswerable.
Unlike us here in the past, our future descendants won’t have any direct evidence of EY’s existence. They may have so little evidence, in fact, that they may be entirely justified in concluding that EY was a fictional character, like James Bond or Harry Potter. I’m not sure if fictional characters can have “teachings” or not.
This question is not analogous, because, unlike the characters on the OT and NT, EY does not make a habit of frequently using prisons as the basis for his parables, nor does EY claim to be any kind of a moral authority. That said, if EY did say these things, and if prisons were found to be extremely immoral in the future—then our descendants would be entirely justified in saying that EY’s morality was far inferior to their own.
I doubt whether there exist any reasonably fresh first-hand accounts of Jesus’s daily life (assuming, of course, that Jesus existed at all). If such accounts did exist, they did not survive the millennia that passed since then. Thus, it would be very difficult to determine what Jesus did and did not do—especially given the fact that we don’t have enough secular evidence to even conclude that he existed with any kind of certainty.
I want to say I don’t know why you think I made that statement, but I do know, and it’s because you don’t understand what I said. I said that given that those drugs fix the psychosis less than half the time, that almost ten percent of cases spontaneously recover anyway, that the entire rest of the utility function might take overwhelming amounts of disutility from side-effects including permanent disfiguring tics, a type of unfixable restlessness that isn’t helped by fidgeting and usually causes great suffering, greater risk of diseases, lack of caring about anything, mental fog (which will definitely impair your ability to find the truth), and psychosis (not even kidding, that’s one of the side-effects of antipsychotics), and given that it can lead to a curtailing of one’s civil liberties to be diagnosed, it might not be worth it. Look, there’s this moral theory called utilitarianism where you can have one bad thing happen and still think it’s worth it because the alternative is worse, and it doesn’t just have to work for morals. It works for anything; you can’t just say “X is bad, fix X at all cost”. You have to be sure it’s not actually the best state of affairs first. Something can be both appalling and the best possible choice, and my utility function isn’t as simple as you seem to think it is. I think there are things of value besides just having perfectly clear perception.
This is the internet. Nothing anyone says on the internet is ever going away, even if some of us really wish it could. /nitpick
I really want to throw up my hands here and say “but I’ve explained this MULTIPLE TIMES, you are BEING AN IDIOT” but I remember the illusion of transparency. And that you haven’t understood. And that you didn’t make a deliberate decision to annoy me. But I’m still annoyed. I STILL want to call you an idiot, even though I know I haven’t phrased something correctly and I should explain again. That doesn’t even sound like what I believe or what I (thought I) said. (Maybe that’s how it came out. Ugh.)
Why is communication so difficult? Why doesn’t knowing that someone’s not doing it on purpose matter? It’s the sort of thing that you’d think would actually affect my feelings.
You would be surprised… If it weren’t for the internet archive much information would have already been lost. Some modern websites are starting to use web design techniques (ajax-loaded content) that break such archive services.
One option would be to reply with a pointer to your previous comment. I see you’ve used the link syntax within a comment—this web site supports permalinks to comments as well. At least you wouldn’t be forced to repeat yourself.
But since I obviously explained it wrong, what good does it do to remind him of where I explained it? I’ve used the wrong words, I need to find new ones. Ugh.
Best wishes. Was your previous explanation earlier in your interchange with Bugmaster? If so, I agree that Bugmaster would have read your explanation, and that pointing to it wouldn’t help (I sympathize). If, however, your previous explanation was in response to another lesswrongian, it is possible that Bugmaster missed it, in which case a pointer might help. I’ve been following your comments, but I’m sure I’ve missed some of them.
Or, perhaps, a link and a clarification.
It’s conceivable that English could drift enough that EY’s meaning would be unclear even if the texts remain.
(I just came back from vacation, sorry for the late reply, and happy New Year ! Also, Merry Christmas if you are so inclined :-) )
Firstly, I operate by Crocker’s Rules, so you can call me anything you want and I won’t mind.
I agree with you completely regarding utilitarianism (although in this case we’re not talking about the moral theory, just the approach in general). All I was saying is that IMO the utility one places on believing things that are likely to be actually true should, IMO, be extremely high—and possibly higher than the utility you assign to this feature. But “extremely high” does not mean “infinite”, of course, and it’s entirely possible that, in some cases, the disutility from all the side-effects will not be worth the utility gain—especially if the side-effects are preventing you from believing true things anyway (f.ex. “mental fog”, psychosis, depression, etc.).
That said, if I personally was seeing visions or hearing voices, I would be willing (assuming I remained reasonably rational, of course) to risk a very large disutility even for a less than 50% chance of fixing the problem. If I can’t trust my senses (or, indeed, my thoughts), then my ability to correctly evaluate my utility is greatly diminished. I could be thinking that everything is just great, while in reality I was hurting myself or others, and I’d be none the wiser. Of course, I could also be just great in reality, as well; but given the way this universe works, this is unlikely.
Data on the Internet is less permanent than many people think, IMO, but this is probably beside the point; I was making an analogy to the Bible, which was written in the days before the Internet, but (sadly) after the days of giant stone steles. Besides, the way things are going, it’s not out of the question that future versions of the Internet would all be written in Chinese...
I think this is because you possess religious faith, which I have never experienced, and thus I am unable to evaluate what you say in the same frame of reference. Or it could be because I’m just obtuse. Or a bit of both.
I don’t think so. The popularity of the English language has gained momentum such that even if its original causes (the economic status of the US) ceased, it would go on for quite a while. Chinese hasn’t. See http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm (It was written a decade and a half ago, but I don’t think the situation is significantly qualitatively different for English and Chinese in ways which couldn’t have been predicted back then.) I think English is going to remain the main international language for at least 30 more years, unless some major catastrophe occurs (where by major I mean ‘killing at least 5% of the world human population’).
There is a bit of ambiguity here, but I asked after it and apparently the more strident interpretation was not intended. The position that the Pope doesn’t determine who is Christian because the Pope is Catholic and therefore doesn’t speak with authority regarding those Christians who are not Catholic seems uncontroversial, internally consistent, and not privileging any particular view.
Ok, that makes more sense, thanks. My apologies (again :-( ) to AK for misreading her point.
I think that by “maximizes average utility” AspiringKnitter meant utility averaged over every human being—so helpfulness and kindness to others is by necessity included.
Since a utility function is only defined up to affine transformations with positive scale factor, what does it mean to sum several utility functions together? (Sure someone has already thought about that, but I can’t think of anything sensible.)
Yeah, that’s a problem with many formulations of utilitarianism.
Surely someone must have proposed some solution(s)?
Weight it by net-worth?
OIC, that would make more sense than what I was thinking; my apologies to AspiringKnitter if I got this wrong.
Misery is a subjective experience. The schizophrenic patients I work with describe feeling a lot of distress because of their symptoms, and their voices usually tell them frightening things. So I would expect a person hearing voices due to psychosis to be more distressed than someone hearing God.
That said, I was less happy when I believed in God because I felt constantly that I had unmet obligations to him.
If the goal is to arrive at the truth no matter one’s background or extenuating circumstances, I don’t think this list quite does the trick. You want a list of steps such that, if a Muslim generated a list using the same cognitive algorithm, it would lead them to the same conclusion your list will lead you to.
From this perspective, #2 is extremely problematic; it assumes the thing you’re trying to establish from the spiritual experience (the veracity of Christianity). If a muslim wrote this step, it’d look totally different, as it would for any religion. (You do hint at this, props for that.) This step will only get you to the truth if you start out already having the truth.
#7 is problematic from a different perspective; well-being and truth-knowledge are not connected on a fundamental level, most noticeably when people around you don’t know the same things you know. For reference, see Gallileo.
Also, my own thought: if we both agree that your brain can generate surprisingly coherent stuff while dreaming, then it seems reasonable to suppose the brain has machinery capable of the process. So my own null hypothesis is that that machinery can get triggered in ways which produce the content of spiritual experiences.
In addition to your discussion with APMason:
When you have a gut feeling, how do you know whether this is (most likely) a regular gut feeling, or whether this is (most likely) God speaking to you ? Gut feelings are different from visions (and possibly dreams), since even perfectly sane and healthy people have them all the time.
I can’t find the source right now, but AFAIK this isn’t merely a joke, but a parable from somewhere in the Talmud. One of the rabbis wants to build an oven in a way that’s proscribed by the Law (because it’d be more convenient for some engineering reason that I forget), and the other rabbis are citing the Law at him to explain why this is wrong. The point of the parable is that the Law is paramount; not even God has the power to break it (to say nothing of mere mortal rabbis). The theme of rules and laws being ironclad is a trope of Judaism that does not, AFAIK, exist in Christianity.
In the Talmudic story, the voice of God makes a claim about the proper interpretation of the Law, but it is dismissed because the interpretation of the Law lies in the domain of Men, where it is bound by certain peculiar hermeneutics. The point is that Halacha does not flow from a single divine authority, but is produced by a legal tradition.
What? The religious lawyers made up a story to overtly usurp God!
And that’s not what I’m thinking of. It’s probably a joke about the parable, though. But I distinctly recall it NOT having a moral and being on the internet on a site of Jewish jokes.
Bugmaster: Well, go with your gut either way, since it’s probably right.
It could be something really surprising to you that you don’t think makes sense or is true, just as one example. Of course, if not, I can’t think of a good way off the top of my head.
Hmm, are you saying that going with your gut is most often the right choice ? Perhaps your gut is smarter than mine, since I can recall many examples from my own life when trusting my intuitions turned out to be a bad idea. Research likewise shows that human intuition often produces wrong answers to important questions; what we call “critical thinking” today is largely a collection of techniques that help people overcome their intuitive biases. Nowadays, whenever I get a gut feeling about something, I try to make the effort to double-check it in a more systematic fashion, just to make sure (excluding exceptional situations such as “I feel like there might be a tiger in that bush”, of course).
I’m claiming that going with your gut instinct usually produces good results, and when time is limited produces the best results available unless there’s a very simple bias involved and an equally simple correction to fix it.
Sometimes I feel my gut is smarter than my explicit reasoning, as I sometimes, when I have to make a decision in a very limited time, I make a choice which, five seconds later, I can’t fully make sense of, but on further reflection I realize it was indeed the most reasonable possible choice after all. (There might some kind of bias I fail to fully correct for, though.)