Yudkowsky was a bit naive here, after all, this page is five years old. He ascribed the passage, Deuteronomy 13.7-11 to “God.” Why would we say that “God said that”?
Well, a quite incautious, naive, religious belief. It is a Christian trope that the Bible is the “:word of God.” But this was part of the Torah, and it’s a part where Moses is telling his people the Law. I’m not a theologian or an expert on scriptural exegesis, but, on the face, Moses, explicitly, in this story of what he said, says “I command you.”′
As a Muslim, I’ve no obligation to accept the literal buffeted text we call the Bible as, in itself, the Word of God, perfectly preserved. But suppose I accept that it is true. That would mean, only, that Moses said this. It would not mean that God said it. Again, following the story, Moses was obeying God, but doesn’t say,. “God said....”
This is a command of a tribal leader in tribal times, regarding the preservation of tribal identity, which is life-and-death under those conditions. It’s crazy to take this tribal command as a universal truth, applicable to all times and conditions. Sure, some do that. We already know that some people are crazy.
Yes, I could go further. But for now I’m merely suggesting that before drawing major conclusions from what is in any text, that we read the text itself, what it says about itself, and what we know about the context. What others say about the text exists on another level, which may have little or nothing to do with the text itself.
Surely that would depend on the passage and how he uses it. However, wasn’t arguing with Yudkowsky here, just pointing out that the little late discussion here was spinning off on that particular piece of unexamined exposition. I reread the piece, and I do come to something that may be interesting.
Yudkowsky is ascribing an “ur-mistake” to that passage, but he generalizes it, into a rigid adherence to a dogma or tightly-defined mission or, most importantly, group identity. That qualifies as an ur-mistake to me, at least for our time. It disables us from seeing the world-as-it-is, and that is now precisely our mission, our task as humans.
It leads us into the “affective death spiral,” and in some of the examples that came up, it’s literally a death spiral.
If so many people were not so harmed by it, it would be funny, the similarity between the fanatics in the world of Islam and the fanatics in the world of, say, fundamentalist Christianity. They are, from my point of view, on the same side, the side of hatred. In religious language, the side of Satan, whose goal is precisely that we fight each other, in order to demonstrate what pieces of dirt we are. (That’s almost a literal translation from the Qur’an.)
Yudkowsky was a bit naive here, after all, this page is five years old. He ascribed the passage, Deuteronomy 13.7-11 to “God.” Why would we say that “God said that”?
Well, a quite incautious, naive, religious belief. It is a Christian trope that the Bible is the “:word of God.” But this was part of the Torah, and it’s a part where Moses is telling his people the Law. I’m not a theologian or an expert on scriptural exegesis, but, on the face, Moses, explicitly, in this story of what he said, says “I command you.”′
As a Muslim, I’ve no obligation to accept the literal buffeted text we call the Bible as, in itself, the Word of God, perfectly preserved. But suppose I accept that it is true. That would mean, only, that Moses said this. It would not mean that God said it. Again, following the story, Moses was obeying God, but doesn’t say,. “God said....”
This is a command of a tribal leader in tribal times, regarding the preservation of tribal identity, which is life-and-death under those conditions. It’s crazy to take this tribal command as a universal truth, applicable to all times and conditions. Sure, some do that. We already know that some people are crazy.
Yes, I could go further. But for now I’m merely suggesting that before drawing major conclusions from what is in any text, that we read the text itself, what it says about itself, and what we know about the context. What others say about the text exists on another level, which may have little or nothing to do with the text itself.
If he used a different passage in his example, you would have no objection?
Surely that would depend on the passage and how he uses it. However, wasn’t arguing with Yudkowsky here, just pointing out that the little late discussion here was spinning off on that particular piece of unexamined exposition. I reread the piece, and I do come to something that may be interesting.
Yudkowsky is ascribing an “ur-mistake” to that passage, but he generalizes it, into a rigid adherence to a dogma or tightly-defined mission or, most importantly, group identity. That qualifies as an ur-mistake to me, at least for our time. It disables us from seeing the world-as-it-is, and that is now precisely our mission, our task as humans.
It leads us into the “affective death spiral,” and in some of the examples that came up, it’s literally a death spiral.
If so many people were not so harmed by it, it would be funny, the similarity between the fanatics in the world of Islam and the fanatics in the world of, say, fundamentalist Christianity. They are, from my point of view, on the same side, the side of hatred. In religious language, the side of Satan, whose goal is precisely that we fight each other, in order to demonstrate what pieces of dirt we are. (That’s almost a literal translation from the Qur’an.)