Yeah, but ‘Just Plain Wrong’ is how I would describe thinking Hawaii is in the Caribbean; It’s not how I would describe having followers that think you are God in flesh.
r_claypool
Karma: 358
Oops, I meant to choose “Accept: turn” instead of “Accept: straight”
Please do.
This was really well written. Thanks for posting it.
Yeah, it was a false dichotomy. I see that now.
Do you (r_claypool) have reason to suspect that Christianity is much more likely to be true than other, (almost-) mutually exclusive supernatural worldviews like, say, Old Norse Paganism?
No, I’ve read way more Christian apologetics than I care to admit, and the basic tenants of the Bible like—“God could find no better way to forgive humans than to have one tortured on a cross”—are no more substantiated by apologists than whatever is part of Old Norse Paganism.
If not, then 5% for Christianity is absurdly high.
But it still doesn’t feel absurdly high.
That’s about right. Five percent was basically a buffer for, “I don’t have full confidence in my epistemology, maybe I’m confused and Christian faith actually is a virtue.”
But I get what everyone has said about privileging the hypothesis. If by faith I’m supposed to choose a religion, after choosing I’d have no answer for, “Why did you trust in those unverifiable claims as opposed to some other unverifiable claims?” This would be true of all religions and supernatural claims, or at least the ones I’m aware of.
I probably should have clarified to say, “the chance that Jesus of Nazareth is a resurrected God.” I think all modern Christianities have this belief in common, and my estimations are based on this lowest common denominator.
How confident is your atheism?
The Old Testament [...] was busy laying down the death penalty for women who wore men’s clothing
But Deuteronomy 22:5/Deuteronomy#22) says nothing about the death penalty. It’s just an abomination, which presumably means, “You’re going to hell, but we won’t necessarily stone you.”
A better argument would be, “The Old Testament [...] was busy laying down the death penalty for victims of rape.”
“If there be a damsel that is a virgin betrothed unto a husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them to death with stones; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbor’s wife: so thou shalt put away the evil from the midst of thee.”—Deuteronomy 22:23-24, ASV/Deuteronomy#22)
I guess they thought it unlikely that the girl tried to scream or that she was threatened with immediate violence. And if she’s not already engaged (28-29), she is forced to marry her rapist without the possibility of divorce.
LW folk (including I think Eliezer and lukeprog) mistakenly believe that algorithmic probability theory implies a low prior for supernaturalism
As lukeprog says here.
The older posts seem to have fewer votes. Even posts that I consider mediocre get upwards of 20 votes these days, yet Occam’s Razor has only 24 right now.
Or maybe it would.
I talked with more than 20 Christians during my deconversion, and actually, they acted as if the standard skeptical arguments made a lot of sense.
The response was never “no way, that doesn’t even make sense.” Rather it was, “well of course we might expect God to do X, but Yahweh works in mysterious ways”. Another was, “you need to stop trusting your intellect so much and trust God/TheBible/Jesus instead.”
Good question, about 10 pages. Message me if you are still interested.
I stopped believing in God a few years ago, and—like this tradition—I’m writing an essay to explain how that happened.
I need some constructive, critical feedback on the current draft. Is anyone interested?
A better measure would be evidence that video games are harmful.
I would not want that guy in my neighborhood. I want to live around people who will not eat me, even if I go crazy.
That reminds me of Yvain’s ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’