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Alicorn comments on A funny argument for traditional morality - Less Wrong
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I think this is an argument for having your values written down somewhere, and maybe even for getting them from a source that is not original to you, but I don't think it is a good reason to base your values on Christianity. The Bible itself does not closely match most modern persons' values, is not internally consistent, and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
Good answer, but people are paying too much attention to the last part of #6. Maybe I should've left it out. Instead of becoming a Biblical literalist (which is stupid as you correctly point out) the hero/ine could study the history of religious morality that influenced their upbringing and try to follow that.
It's a bird...it's a plane...it's a Third Alternative!
That argument is applicable only to sola scriptura Protestantism, and therefore not to the teachings of most Christian churches.
See #6. The teachings of churches are not unchanging; documents such as the Bible are or at least can be.
Yes, but teachings of churches can also be stable for periods of time long enough to be relevant for this discussion (at least in principle). I don't know whether the original article was written with this in mind, but I understood #6 to refer to any such long-standing tradition. Clearly no religious group nowadays (or in the last couple millenniums, for that matter) espouses Biblical teachings without thick layers of traditional interpretation, whether they admit it or not. So insofar as the question is interesting at all, it should be asked about these traditional interpretations, not the raw Biblical text.
(Also, while documents can remain unchanged for arbitrary periods of time in the sense of containing the same series of writing symbols, their interpretations will inevitably change even if the greatest efforts are made to interpret them with maximal literalism or originalism. Consider, for example, that a text written in a living language will, in some centuries, become an archaic document undecipherable without special linguistic and historical training, which by the very nature of things requires some nontrivial interpretation to extract any meaning out of it. In this situation, I don't think it's meaningful to talk about the document remaining "unchanged" in any practically relevant sense.)
once you can pick and choose between various churches you open yourself up to exactly the same sort of drift this is designed to avoid
Well, yes, clearly. But the original argument makes sense only assuming a unique and stable tradition that has determined the values you were brought up with. If this happens to be the tradition of some realistic Christian church (or Jewish denomination), chances are that the text of the Bible is only one element of this tradition -- it definitely doesn't imply the whole content of the tradition by itself, and it may well even contradict parts of it, or at least be harmonized only with strained interpretations. (All this even if an opposite pretense is maintained.)
To evaluate the argument from the original article accurately, it is necessary to have a realistic picture of what the tradition in question exactly consists of. It is mistaken to assume that the answer to that question is simply the text of the Bible.