Lumifer comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong

107 Post author: Yvain 13 March 2009 01:41AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (226)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Lumifer 05 May 2016 06:43:05PM *  1 point [-]

According to this, at least some ancient-ish Hebrew commentators thought

According to your own link, some commentators thought that the snake was an intelligent humanoid, some thought it was Satan in the flesh, and some thought that Genesis was... mistaken about the snake speaking.

All it shows is that the variety of interpretations is wide. "Not an unthinkable thought" is a remarkably low bar, at this level pretty much anything goes.

So that's exactly the point of people saying "ha ha, your religion has a talking snake in it"

That's a stupid point, of the same kind as "the Pope wears a silly hat, ha-ha, he must be really dumb". It's just agitprop. I don't see any reason to pay attention to such "points", do you?

Comment author: gjm 05 May 2016 09:13:26PM -1 points [-]

"Not an unthinkable thought" is a remarkably low bar

For sure. My point is that the culture Genesis 3 came out of was one that had at least some inclination to accept the idea of talking snakes, which makes it more plausible that the talking snake in Genesis 3 was intended to be understood as, well, an actual talking snake (which is how, at face value, the story describes it) rather than a puppet of the Devil, or a metaphor for human curiosity, or whatever.