paper-machine comments on Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2009 05:16PM

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Comment author: PhilosophyTutor 31 December 2011 04:49:08PM *  0 points [-]

No, that's a completely unbelievable explanation. If he was fictional he'd not have been of Nazareth with a circuitous reasoning about why he was also of Bethlehem -- he'd have been directly of Bethlehem. His name wouldn't have been Jesus with a completely circuitous explanation about why "Emmanuel" also counts as his name, his name would have been directly Emmanuel.

These all seem to me to be false dichotomies, which assume that it's impossible either for a single creator to have embroidered their story as they went along, or for multiple creators or editors to have changed the story at different points in time.

Nor do I know of any fictional characters that are so deliberately placed recent history and yet their existence is believed by their contemporaries as real. If the Christian movement had began in the 1st century, and yet its founder placed as having lived in 3rd century BC, that explanation might make sense. But he was placed as a contemporary, and expected to be believed to be real. You don't do that with fictional founders of your order.

As long as it's far enough away in time and space that your claims can't be checked, what difference does it make? This seems to me like a post hoc justification for believing the Bible story, not an argument that anyone would have come up with if they didn't have a pet hypothesis to defend.

Also we don't have any evidence that Jesus' contemporaries believed he was real. The reports of people believing Jesus was real come from long after Jesus supposedly died.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 December 2011 05:25:46PM *  4 points [-]

Nor do I know of any fictional characters that are so deliberately placed recent history and yet their existence is believed by their contemporaries as real.

How about Huangdi?

"Throughout most of Chinese history, the Yellow Emperor and the other ancient sages were considered to be real historical figures. Their historicity started to be questioned in the 1920s by historians like Gu Jiegang, one of the founders of the Doubting Antiquity School in China. In their attempts to prove that the earliest figures of Chinese history were mythological, Gu and his followers argued that these ancient sages were originally gods who were later depicted as humans by the rationalist intellectuals of the Warring States period. Yang Kuan (楊寬), a member of the same historiographical current, noted that only in the late Warring States had the Yellow Emperor started to be described as the first ruler of China. Yang thus argued that Huangdi was a late transformation of Shangdi, the supreme god of the Shang pantheon.

[snip]

Most scholars now agree that the Yellow Emperor was originally a deity who was later transformed into a human figure."

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 31 December 2011 09:05:18PM *  4 points [-]

I said placed in recent history, and contemporaries. The Yellow Emperor seems to have been placed millenia in the past, compared to when belief in him existed.

The proper comparison of the Yellow Emperor would be someone like Noah or Enoch - someone placed many centuries or even millenia in the past of when he was known to be believed in -- and I certainly would consider Noah and Enoch to be most likely fictions, never to have been based on real people at all.

Jesus is a different sort of fish altogether.

Comment author: wedrifid 31 December 2011 11:00:56PM *  3 points [-]

Jesus is a different sort of fish altogether.

So, Jesus is the kind of fish that exists only as a symbol of Christian group identity? ;)

Comment author: Multiheaded 07 January 2012 07:47:18PM 0 points [-]

Philip K. Dick would have a lot to say on this.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 January 2012 11:31:09PM 0 points [-]

Philip K. Dick would have a lot to say on this.

About the casual use of double entendre? I bet he does.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 December 2011 10:14:33PM *  2 points [-]

Hm. Good point. I'm unwilling to give up the search quite yet, however, because I feel the boundary between myth and reality is so fragile in the past that an example like what you're looking for must surely exist.

One gets a bit closer with Cú Chulainn and some other figures from the Ulster Cycle; the gap there is merely seven or eight centuries instead of two millennia.

Comment author: Desrtopa 10 January 2012 06:47:30PM 2 points [-]

Seven or eight centuries is an awfully long time in a culture that doesn't keep good records.

I remember reading with some surprise a transcription of some tribal history of a group of Plains Indians, which ended with the assertion that their forefathers had been so living there for "at least seven generations, perhaps more." In reality, it had been much, much longer, they simply hadn't been keeping track.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 January 2012 07:15:07PM 4 points [-]

If that's an accurate quote from the Plains Indians, it's much to their credit-- they weren't making claims wildly beyond their knowledge.

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