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ialdabaoth comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
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Many (most? all?) Christians believe the snake was really Satan, who took the form of a snake to trick Eve. Treating it as an ordinary snake that happened to be able to talk is probably as gross a misrepresentation as the lady's misrepresentation of evolution.
I don't know what actual Christians believe, but how could this be when god cursed that the snake would have to crawl on its belly for the rest of its days ("on your belly you shall go"), and yet later in the New Testament Satan walks with Jesus on earth to tempt him to idolatry with the offer of the kingdoms?
Besides, if it's Satan, why punish snakes instead?
I haven't talked about this with an actual Christian, but it seems to me that an erudite Christian won't hold this view that the snake was Satan, especially when you can get rid of the contradiction by saying the snake was not Satan.
Actual response I got as a child in Sunday school, when I pointed out this and various other weirdnesses:
"God is more powerful than human logic. Just because something seems like a contradiction to you, doesn't mean it's a contradiction if God does it."
That brings up some interesting questions about other biblical statements that might be considered important from a religious perspective... within the scope of our flawed, human logic, of course.
Didn't think about that. But this actually makes a lot of sense. This is the only way you can believe in those things. You completely ignore reason and take it all on faith.
For me, though, it was worse than that - how do you "take on faith" a concept that isn't even rationally coherent? That was always my question - what exactly is it that I'm supposed to be believing? Because if something doesn't make sense, then I don't understand it; and if I don't understand it, how am I supposed to really "believe" it? And when people respond with "well you just have to have faith", my response was always "yes, but faith in WHAT?" / "Faith in God." / "Yes, but what do you mean by God?"
"You don't have to understand to believe" never, ever, ever made coherent sense to me.
Do you believe in both general relativity and QCD? Do you understand the Universe? Until the map is indistinguishable from the territory we will have incoherent beliefs about things that we don't fully understand. It's the degree of confidence in our beliefs that matters. GR and QCD are incoherent, but we can have extremely high confidence in our beliefs about practical things using those theories. Black holes and dark energy less so.