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Apprentice comments on Rationality Quotes: November 2010 - Less Wrong
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Comments (354)
While I don't particularly mind this being downvoted and would normally have expected it to be, I am slightly confused why this pantheistic anti-Bible quote is being downvoted while the pantheistic anti-Bible quote I posted it in reply to is being upvoted so much.
Besides those differences already mentioned by others: The parent quote talks about the continuous discovery of knowledge, yours talks about the obliteration of knowledge ("the words will be gone"), as if the fact that a text can be deleted proves it wrong.
-2 isn't a whole lot.
However, I think your quote is an unfair comparison. Christianity is not identically equal to physical bibles. Wiccans put a mythic overlay on the wind and the rain.
Well, there is the idea that if you'd wipe out all memory of Christianity, it'd never come back, but if you'd wipe out all memory of direct natural phenomena like wind and rain, people would rediscover them pretty quickly.
But they wouldn't rediscover the mythic overlay, which is what makes the original quote a lie and an attempt to steal credit.
There seems to be an interesting factual question lurking here: how much of the mythic overlay would people reinvent in a similar form, even if they forgot all their language and culture? A quick search turned up the amazing Wikipedia page List of thunder gods. Of course, the major monotheistic religions are also very similar to each other (I'd say about as close as C# was to Java when it first appeared), but they didn't arise in ignorance of each other, as pagan mythologies did.
The various LISPs may also be a good analogy.
I was thinking the same. My understanding is that neopaganism is more about the general process with which people come up with mythic significance for natural phenomena than any specific pagan myth. There certainly seems to be a case for humans doing that spontaneously in a state of nature, though it's hard to tell exactly how wide the variation would be.
The closest the human universals list has are "belief in supernatural/religion" and "weather control (attempts to)". So everyone ends up trying to magic up nature into doing stuff, but they're not necessarily reverent about it like the neopagans would like?
Christianity would not come back. Not with that name and not with those details.
Science would not come back either, not with that name and not with those details. It would actually be fascinating to see how we built up our understanding a second time around. Much of how we carve reality into human sized pieces is an artifact of how it was discovered as well as mere chance. Rediscovering the mechanisms behind natural phenomena may well produce systems of knowledge that take considerable effort to understand.
I think that human sized pieces will always be human sized pieces. Important discoveries may be made in a different order, but if we turned back the clock I'm pretty sure we'd rediscover fire, positional numeral systems (though not necessarily base 10), metallurgy, and electromagnetism, assuming humanity doesn't go extinct too fast. On the other hand, achievements like space travel and the nuclear bomb depended heavily on the geopolitics of the time, and I wouldn't expect them to be replicated.
I'm just wondering if we would end up breaking the pieces up in different ways, ways that are unintuitive to us.
I can think of several reasons
Dunno either. I liked yours.
Maybe people are associating the Wiccan connection with New Agey woo and the straight-up anti-rationalism it sometimes turns into.
NMDV, but I have no idea what your quote is supposed to mean.
It ties into several pagan themes; this-worldliness, nature-worship, immanence, pantheism, anti-dogmatism and the continuity and durability of these ideas.
Okay. Well people here tend to like this-worldliness and anti-dogmatism but tend to dislike nature-worship, 'immanence' and pantheism. So that pretty much explains the downvotes.
Compare to the first one which is a poem about how science is way cooler than religion. It's like rationalist catnip. I wouldn't take it personally.