I’m all for appropriating religious language for fun, but the kind of argument David Brin makes strikes me as unhygienic. Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you’ve decided on ahead of time is sinful, and I feel would actually be seen as disrespectful by most Christians. Jews like Brin do it all the time, but they’re a minority.
Compare the Creationist who writes that the theory of evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. She literally doesn’t care whether she’s right, since it’s not her true rejection, and that makes her paper more annoying to scientists than if she’d just quoted her own sacred text.
Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you’ve decided on ahead of time is sinful, and I feel would actually be seen as disrespectful by most Christians.
I don’t think it makes much sense to get too sensitive about Bible quotes; the context seems more like quoting poetry to me, along the lines of trawling Shakespeare for phrases to use as a title or chapter heading. There’s plenty of precedent for doing so, both theistic and nontheistic: so much so, actually, that I think the text of the Bible might be more important as a work of literature than it is as religious doctrine. After all, most of the points of any particular Christian denomination (even nominally fundamentalist ones) are derived not from a clear “thou shalt” but from one or two lines of the text filtered through a rather tortured process of interpretation, and there’s way more text than there is active doctrine.
This all goes double for the Old Testament, and triple for anything like Revelation that’s usually understood in allegorical terms.
Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you’ve decided on ahead of time is sinful, as it is written: “And in the eleventh year, in the month Bul, which is the eighth month, was the house finished throughout all the parts thereof, and according to all the fashion of it. So was he seven years in building it.”
That’s sloppy, even for a random quote. The immediately preceding verse is “The foundation of the temple of the LORD was laid in the fourth year, in the month of Ziv.”
11 − 7 = 4.
Whatever the flaws of the book of First Kings, failures of basic arithmetic in the literal text isn’t one of them.
I feel like this would be a bad thing if there was some truth or reality that was being distorted. But simply retelling a story in a new light to make a new point is not new, nor do I see a problem with it. For example, “Wicked” is a great retelling of “The Wizard of Oz” from the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view. It takes the opportunity to make commentary on society, as well as the nature of story-telling.
For that matter, Methods of Rationality is a retelling of the Harry Potter cannon to tell a story that supports a particular conclusion drawn ahead of time. That’s the nature of stories. As long as one doesn’t confuse “story” with “reality”, the “telling” with the “drawing the conclusion”, then there shouldn’t be a problem.
I think this could only be called unhygienic if people took the story to be literal truth. I don’t think anyone here is in danger of that, and I suspect anyone who does think that way is unlikely to be swayed very far with Brin’s clever turn of phrase.
I think this could only be called unhygienic if people took the story to be literal truth. I don’t think anyone here is in danger of that, and I suspect anyone who does think that way is unlikely to be swayed very far with Brin’s clever turn of phrase.
I thought that was the point of his talk! Wasn’t he saying, in short, “Singularitarians, even if they’re atheists, should quote the Bible when reaching out to Bible-believers?”
Yeah, but I think he was talking more of the “much of this is metaphor and can be interpreted in many ways” crowd. People who are already halfway to thinking life extension might be ok and not an unholy usurping of god’s will.
It always bother me when atheists argue about the right way to argue with believers. This presupposes that there is a single Right Way. Personally, I’m happy that I live in a world where there are blunt and uncompromising people like Richard Dawkins, and people who take a gentler approach. And I’m happy that there are people using David Brin’s clever Bible-quoting tricks. The combination of multiple approaches is more effective than picking one and using it consistently.
You’re just arguing that a “mixed strategy” (rather than a “pure strategy”) is better, which might well be true, in which case we should figure out which mixed strategy is the Right Way...
Different atheists also perform differently with different strategies. Thus, taking into account comparative advantage, unless there is a severe shortage or excess of practitioners of a strategy, or a strategy’s usefulness has been severely misjudged, the Right Way is simply for everyone to keep doing whatever they’re best at. Hence “don’t criticize each others’ strategies” rather than “75% of incendiaries should switch to being diplomats”.
On re-reading, I agree with you. I’m pretty sure that a reasonable argument can be made that closely resembles what I said, so I’m just going to post this instead of strikethrough-ifying that comment.
David Brin
I’m all for appropriating religious language for fun, but the kind of argument David Brin makes strikes me as unhygienic. Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you’ve decided on ahead of time is sinful, and I feel would actually be seen as disrespectful by most Christians. Jews like Brin do it all the time, but they’re a minority.
Compare the Creationist who writes that the theory of evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. She literally doesn’t care whether she’s right, since it’s not her true rejection, and that makes her paper more annoying to scientists than if she’d just quoted her own sacred text.
I don’t think it makes much sense to get too sensitive about Bible quotes; the context seems more like quoting poetry to me, along the lines of trawling Shakespeare for phrases to use as a title or chapter heading. There’s plenty of precedent for doing so, both theistic and nontheistic: so much so, actually, that I think the text of the Bible might be more important as a work of literature than it is as religious doctrine. After all, most of the points of any particular Christian denomination (even nominally fundamentalist ones) are derived not from a clear “thou shalt” but from one or two lines of the text filtered through a rather tortured process of interpretation, and there’s way more text than there is active doctrine.
This all goes double for the Old Testament, and triple for anything like Revelation that’s usually understood in allegorical terms.
Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you’ve decided on ahead of time is sinful, as it is written: “And in the eleventh year, in the month Bul, which is the eighth month, was the house finished throughout all the parts thereof, and according to all the fashion of it. So was he seven years in building it.”
http://www.randombiblequotes.com/
That’s sloppy, even for a random quote. The immediately preceding verse is “The foundation of the temple of the LORD was laid in the fourth year, in the month of Ziv.”
11 − 7 = 4.
Whatever the flaws of the book of First Kings, failures of basic arithmetic in the literal text isn’t one of them.
I feel like this would be a bad thing if there was some truth or reality that was being distorted. But simply retelling a story in a new light to make a new point is not new, nor do I see a problem with it. For example, “Wicked” is a great retelling of “The Wizard of Oz” from the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view. It takes the opportunity to make commentary on society, as well as the nature of story-telling.
For that matter, Methods of Rationality is a retelling of the Harry Potter cannon to tell a story that supports a particular conclusion drawn ahead of time. That’s the nature of stories. As long as one doesn’t confuse “story” with “reality”, the “telling” with the “drawing the conclusion”, then there shouldn’t be a problem.
I think this could only be called unhygienic if people took the story to be literal truth. I don’t think anyone here is in danger of that, and I suspect anyone who does think that way is unlikely to be swayed very far with Brin’s clever turn of phrase.
I thought that was the point of his talk! Wasn’t he saying, in short, “Singularitarians, even if they’re atheists, should quote the Bible when reaching out to Bible-believers?”
Yeah, but I think he was talking more of the “much of this is metaphor and can be interpreted in many ways” crowd. People who are already halfway to thinking life extension might be ok and not an unholy usurping of god’s will.
Isn’t that the job description of an apologist? I don’t think most apologists are viewed as sinful or disrespectful by others of their faith.
It always bother me when atheists argue about the right way to argue with believers. This presupposes that there is a single Right Way. Personally, I’m happy that I live in a world where there are blunt and uncompromising people like Richard Dawkins, and people who take a gentler approach. And I’m happy that there are people using David Brin’s clever Bible-quoting tricks. The combination of multiple approaches is more effective than picking one and using it consistently.
You’re just arguing that a “mixed strategy” (rather than a “pure strategy”) is better, which might well be true, in which case we should figure out which mixed strategy is the Right Way...
(I’m not sure how your comment was relevant.)
Different atheists also perform differently with different strategies. Thus, taking into account comparative advantage, unless there is a severe shortage or excess of practitioners of a strategy, or a strategy’s usefulness has been severely misjudged, the Right Way is simply for everyone to keep doing whatever they’re best at. Hence “don’t criticize each others’ strategies” rather than “75% of incendiaries should switch to being diplomats”.
On re-reading, I agree with you. I’m pretty sure that a reasonable argument can be made that closely resembles what I said, so I’m just going to post this instead of strikethrough-ifying that comment.