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.
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.