Nebu comments on The Sacred Mundane - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 March 2009 09:53AM

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Tags: antitheism religion theconstantfire joy_in_the_real anti-epistemology

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 March 2009 09:28:52PM 24 points [-]

Real religious experiences, the sort where you get one, say "Oh, I just saw God" and spend the rest of your life in a monastery trying in vain to capture that sense of connection again

I know an atheist who gets these. She used to think it was future superintelligences talking to her, but eventually she asked herself some very hard questions and managed to realize it was just a brain storm. It's one of the most heroic acts of rationality I've ever seen anyone perform.

But considering that some atheists do get these involuntarily and the vast supermajority of religious folk never get them at all, why call them "religious experiences"?

Comment author: Nebu 07 April 2009 07:39:13PM 15 points [-]

But considering that some atheists do get these involuntarily and the vast supermajority of religious folk never get them at all, why call them "religious experiences"?

Perhaps the same reason we call the game "Chinese Checkers" despite not being from China and not a variant of checkers: someone called it that, and the name stuck, and it's "too late" to change it now.

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