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Kaj_Sotala comments on Rationality quotes: May 2010 - Less Wrong
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(In a thread where people were asked whether or not they had a religious experience of "feeling God"):
-- Axiomatic
Is this really different from the mentality that says people permanently dying is a good thing because it's a feature of atheism, which is a good belief system because it's true?
I would question that this is a rationality quote. It's a quote about how atheism is better for aesthetic reasons.
On the surface, yes.
It's an anecdote that the "numinous" feelings that the religious sometimes cite as evidence of God can equally well be interpreted the opposite way. We can pull out Bayes' Theorem to show that these numinous feelings really don't make belief in God more rational. This isn't a hugely controversial point here, but I think what this says about seizing on how evidence supports one's side without considering the ramifications for the other is worth remembering.
True, but I had the feeling that some readers here would like it anyway. (I view this as more of a "quotes LW readers would like" thread than a literal "rationality quotes" thread.)
Also, it does fit into the joy in the merely real ethos, which in turn makes it emotionally easier to accept rationalism and reductionism.
In spirit of full disclosure, not all religions were possessed by tawdry fantasies. Some embraced the regularity and beauty physical law as a sign of Bog's greatness. Unfortunately this little glitch contributed to me getting stuck thinking that Judaism is actually was rational for 20 years. I stopped thinking too early.
"R. Simeon b. Pazzi said in the name of R. Joshua b. Levi on the authority of Bar Kappara: He who knows how to calculate the cycles and planetary courses, but does not, of him Scripture saith, but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither have they considered the operation of his hands." (Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath 75, about 1700 years back)
Right, and this is what I was used to as well, though I wasn't familiar with that quote. ("Bog" is handy. I like that.)
As for the "glory" -- yes, I've felt it too. Exactly, exactly the same way. "The world is sufficient." But that sense of joy can't be enough to keep you going, because sometimes the world is horrible, and it is not sufficient, not for me, not as long as I have the capacity to love people and worry for them. Joy is there, but it's not the whole story.
Got Bog from Heinlein. I nice positive side effect of shedding mental handcuffs is that I restarted my sci-fi reading career, and being out for 20 years left me with a huge green pasture ;)
I also think my own break with religion started with an emotional experience, or perhaps the experience just broke the dam of all the mental incoherence I have piled up under the carpet. I saw pics from Haiti of medical workers piling up children's bodies; I 'knew' then that if god exists he does not give a crap about things I care about; I was never 'religious' enough to think that me and my children are any 'better' than what I saw in front of me. The rest was a trivial exercise in comparison (mostly historical research and some logic).
In general the problem with religion that it's a web of beliefs, and people cannot extricate themselves one strand at a time, the strands simply tend to regrow (though weaker, I think). You need a powerful emotional experience to pull enough threads all at once.
Incidentally, this is a big benefit on the something to protect emphasis here.
You probably know this, but Bog is the Russian (similar in other Slavic languages) word for God.
Funny, of course I know it - Russian was my first language, but somehow I parsed it as being a whimsical made up word; I knew I was out of practice, but not this much!
The exact opposite happened to me: I read a bunch of sci fi, and since very few of the authors I read were religious, I was essentially getting an atheistic worldview through books. That conflicted with my religious beliefs, and God lost.
Mr. Axiomatic is fortunate to have exercised Original Sight to arrive at the realization that mere reality is worthy of joy. I was oblivious to this until I started reading all the popular atheists saying how reality is great, and then when Eliezer handled it in a series with the utmost clarity and depth.
Its a shame the idea that "god" is a person with a personality has competed-out other ways of thinking of god. Is there a deep mystery that our own consciousness even exists? Are we connected in that mystery with the billions of other consciousnesses around us? In ignorance of what even consciousness is, are we sure it inheres in our bodies and not somewhere else?
If god is the label for consciousness beyond your own consciousness, AND you admit the probability that god is not an angry-father-like personality that wants to help some people, hurt other people, and COULD fix everything if he wanted to, the world gets a lot more interesting.
In my opinion, the experience described in this quote is a classic mystical experience. That it leads you away from the god-as-angry-father picture of god is likely true of every other mystic, especially the famous ones.
Read the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence and the Twelve Virtues (especially that of Curiosity). We can't be "connected in that mystery" because the feeling of mysteriousness is a type of ignorance, and ignorance of some phenomenon is a fact about our minds, not about the phenomenon. When something seems mysterious to us, the proper thing to do is to think about how to solve it, not to worship our ignorance.
If God means all that, then you've just changed the definition so much that there's no point in calling it "God" anymore. To make sure you're not just sneaking in connotations, try describing whatever it is you're calling "God" but giving it a different label — say, "spruckel". "Spruckel is the consciousness beyond your own consciousness". Does that feel different to you than "God is the consciousness beyond your own consciousness"? If so, you need to consider what the word "God" is doing in your mind when you hear it, and specifically notice that it's something the word is doing rather than anything about what you claim to be defining it as. If not, then... well, then you won't mind henceforth using the word "spruckel" for this thing you're describing instead.
"Spruckel" is my new go-to nonsense word. It sounds like it should be a three-inch-tall woodland creature of some kind.
According to Richard Verstigan's Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605), the ancient Saxons called the month of February "Sprout-kele":