Rationality is to a Christian somewhat as the Dark Arts are to us. Christians have often made conversions based on reason, even though giving reason legitimacy makes their converts “dumber” and less-able to resist the temptation of reason.
They haven’t said “these practices are off-limits to us”. They strive for an optimal tradeoff between winning converts and corrupting their religion. We can consider their policies to have been selected by evolution. So we should be suspicious of claims that we, using reason, can find tradeoffs better than 2000 years of cultural evolution can. Particularly when our tradeoff ax + by involves suspicious numbers like a=0 and b=1.
Actually quite a few Christians are very rational people. It is possible to use only some of the tools or rationality, to dig your own grave even deeper than you could if you knew nothing of it.
Becoming a more sophisticate debater for instance.
Those people don’t consider “rationality” as something negative, far from it. They have their own idea of what rationality is, of course, but that idea overlaps ours enough that those two concepts can be considered to be similar.
I’m oversimplifying; but if you go back into church history, especially pre-Enlightenment, you’ll find that most of the major church fathers made statements explicitly condemning rationality.
What same argument? I don’t follow.
Rationality is to a Christian somewhat as the Dark Arts are to us. Christians have often made conversions based on reason, even though giving reason legitimacy makes their converts “dumber” and less-able to resist the temptation of reason.
They haven’t said “these practices are off-limits to us”. They strive for an optimal tradeoff between winning converts and corrupting their religion. We can consider their policies to have been selected by evolution. So we should be suspicious of claims that we, using reason, can find tradeoffs better than 2000 years of cultural evolution can. Particularly when our tradeoff ax + by involves suspicious numbers like a=0 and b=1.
Actually quite a few Christians are very rational people. It is possible to use only some of the tools or rationality, to dig your own grave even deeper than you could if you knew nothing of it.
Becoming a more sophisticate debater for instance.
Those people don’t consider “rationality” as something negative, far from it. They have their own idea of what rationality is, of course, but that idea overlaps ours enough that those two concepts can be considered to be similar.
I’m oversimplifying; but if you go back into church history, especially pre-Enlightenment, you’ll find that most of the major church fathers made statements explicitly condemning rationality.