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Book of Mormon Discussion
In this comment thread, I gave the following idea, on the topic of a method by which one might judge the Book of Mormon from a rationalist perspective:
Why not make this an online thing? Day-by-day, or perhaps week-by-week, post (somewhere, not necessarily on Less Wrong, so as not to clutter the site; though perhaps Less Wrong would actually be the ideal locale, due to familiarity, extant population, etc?) a chapter of the Book of Mormon and allow discussion of it, separately from the rest of the Book, using terms common to Rationalists.
I would appreciate feedback on this idea, for an admittedly selfish reason: I am trying to instigate in myself a Crisis of Faith. So, here are the questions I pose to you:
- Would it be a Good Idea to subject the Book of Mormon, chapter by chapter, to a group rationalist judgement?
- Would it be a Good Idea, given the above, to ask Less Wrong to host this discussion? On the one end, we want the maximum number of rationalists to input the maximum number of times, so we should host our discussion near the nexus of rationalist gathering. On the other end, if this discussion is judged to be frivolous and wasteful by the majority of active posters on Less Wrong, then we don't want to detract from the true meaning of the site.
Remember: This is a good chance to examine the best arguments of those who believe that the sky is green. If the sky is green, then you should want to believe that the sky is green, too!
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Comments (44)
I expect this to be almost entirely a loss from a (personal) signal-to-noise ratio standpoint, if hosted on LW. It might be worth doing elsewhere, but please don't try it here.
Very much a good point, and consonant with the feedback I'm receiving from others. Thank you.
Basically only religious people think it is interesting to go through a holy book chapter-by-chapter. It would almost be interesting to attempt to examine the archaeological record together, but it turns out that whenever anyone tries this with Mormons, the tiniest shred of evidence is treated as though it were thousands of times as powerful as it should be. A classic example of this is the Bat Creek inscription -- not as interpreted by archaeologists (who think it's a fraud), but as interpreted by a global-warming-denier economics professor.
The only way I can see this discussion being fruitful would be to actually build a Bayesian network for each top-level claim and then individually assign probabilities; this at least would be an interesting exercise.
An interesting idea, but in my opinion, the only way to build an accurate Bayesian network for the top-level claims would be to examine the context whence those claims come.
You could have one Bayesian network to show how likely Mormonism is, and a separate one for how likely it is for a holy book to say that otherwise. Alternately, you could just give the ratio of how likely it is if Mormonism is true and how likely it is to be stated otherwise. I suppose you'd have to calculate for a given religion, and then multiply by the number of religions.
Well really, that would be far to general. If we're questing for the One True Religion - or, rather, the One True Belief System, with atheism included in there as a belief in the Merely Real - then we'd need separate Bayesian networks for each religion. Otherwise one of the less wacky religions would have its score brought down by one of the more wacky ones, when in fact they exist independently of one another.
Sounds like a daunting project. Shall we get started? :P
A lot of them would share the same nodes. For example, any Judeo-Christian religion will adhere to the Old Testament.
Not "any". :3 Mormons, for example, consider the Bible to have become flawed over time. That's why we hold high the Book of Mormon; it's come to us more directly, and is thereby promised not to contain flaws.
Article of Faith 8:
The problem I have with the book of mormon is, jesus's death was not enough.
What I have read it has more hoops to jump to get saved
True, but it's largely just a few differences that they specified in the Pearl of Great Price. They do not believe, for example, that the story of Noah's Arc was caused by a mistranslation.
The bigger problems would be other religions that believe it may not have been literal, or that it may have been a mistranslation (I've heard it suggested that they had the same word for "land" and "world", and the flood was actually much more localized.)
Or that "40 days" is a linguistic construction meaning literally "a long freaking time". :P No, it's not just a few differences in the PoGP. It's basic errors that are quite evident - prolific, even - in the Bible. If every Christian sect read the Bible the same way, why would there be different sects? No, just because they all "believe the Bible" doesn't mean you can use "the Bible" as one node in your network.
The 40 days part is often considered symbolic, but the time period doesn't really matter.
Can you be the sole determinant about which pieces of information do and do not matter? Let me tell you: if I had to take that "40 days" literally, I would drop the whole claptrap and take up the atheist flag. That wouldn't be raining; that would be hydraulic mining. Nothing on earth would survive, not even an "ark made out of gopher wood".
You're not facing the problem. You can't write off any of the nodes and say "well, this one doesn't matter". You cannot know what other people know unless you ask them. This project of mapping the Bayesian networks of every belief system on the planet is difficult, insanely difficult, impossible. That doesn't mean you can skip over some parts and pretend they don't matter. Do you know what happens if you try to do that in quantum mechanics? You get the wrong answer. And considering what's at stake here, that would be devastating.
I'm not sure if LW is the best place for this. Right now, it won't drown out any other discussion, but I fear that the whole atheist debate might creep in and then LW becomes just another skeptics blog full of science fanboys and trolls. A one-time post or advertisement of another blog/forum to have the discussion seems acceptable, though. There have been many cases of theists becoming useful rationalists.
Personally, I'm not interested in the whole Mormon thing at all. It's just way too silly. The mere requirements to make Mormonism even an idea worth thinking about aren't met in any way. (e.g., the world doesn't look supervised, Old Testament is entirely unhistorical nonsense, New Testament is at best the product of political propaganda and at worst Sai-Baba level myth, the texts aren't in any way compatible with each other ("god" in Amos, Deuteronomy, Mark, John and Revelation means entirely different things), "let's tell a small tribe and ignore the majority of humanity for thousands of years" is totally how a benevolent god would act and so on). I mean, try to step back, ignore everything you know about religion and history and ask yourself, if there were a very powerful and interested entity, predating all of humanity, what would it do? How would it act? Compare that to the much weaker variant of FAI and how it's typically depicted of acting. After you've made predictions based on this belief, does the world look anything like that at all? (Seriously, it tells a dude to write a book? And not even a good one?!)
(Also, if you have to write ancient mythology fan-fiction, please don't just rip off the Sumerians and claim it's original. I'm looking at you, Hebrews.)
On a tangential note, it seems that the author of that article is seriously confused about the chronology of the Ancient Near East. The earliest Sumerian cuneiform documents date from circa ~3100BC, and the earliest examples of Middle Eastern proto-writing are at most 300-400 years older than that. The literalist Biblical chronology used by the young Earth creationists places the date of the creation much earlier, around ~4000BC. So while creationism obviously has many problems, its alleged inconsistency with the Sumerian civilization is not one of them.
(On the other hand, there are extant examples of undeciphered proto-writing much older than 4000BC, most notably the Vinca,Tartaria, and Dispilio symbols, but none of these has anything to to with the Sumerians. However, the exact nature of these symbols, and how close they were to a real writing system, is unknown.)
:3 Thank you for demonstrating your own point; it's well taken.
Well put.
I think a better first step for you would be to find fora on the web where similarly text-driven religious beliefs are espoused, discussed, supported, and apologized for. Beliefs of fundamentalist jews, fundamentalist christians, fundamentalist muslims, fundamental atheists. (I'm not sure if there are any non-judaeo-christian examples of this happening) I think you then need to determine whether any or some of these have equivalently excellent and miraculous bases for their beliefs, especially if they are at odds with BoM. At his point you have an increased ability to "calibrate" the meaning of your own magnificent structure around BoM. That is, if you can see your structure, and someone else's structure that leads them to conclusions inconsistent with BoM, then you need to resolve those consistencies.
Myself, I think there is plently apparent magic in the world, that it supports christians and jews and astrologers and communists and libertarians, and yes, even singularists. To all of it I apply what I call my "Siegfried and Roy" rule. I don't need to know how they got the tiger to appear in the empty cage suspended above the stage in order to know it is not magic. And I do need to know that whatever miraculous and verifiable knowledge they do have comes far from proving that they are a reliable source on the supernatural which can by definition I would imagine never be proved.
I think your place here is limited until the BoM seems no more special to you than the Bible or the teachings of the Dalai Lama or Kants critique of pure reason or Penn & Teller's magic show.
There's no way someone not already infected with BoM should ever devote the kind of resources to it that your proposal suggests.
Mulling over it for a few minutes, I'd be quite interested in a series of posts on why the sky is green. Literally.
Huh. Actually, that would be quite interesting.
Mormonism in general can be a devastating anti-religious datum. Yes, the internet atheists try to point out the silliness of various aspects of religion via parody, but they're generally preaching to the choir, because their parodies are transparently too silly. "Kissing Hank's Ass", "The Flying Spaghetti Monster", etc. work as allegory but fail as persuasion.
But Mormonism? It's as if someone exaggerated the least plausible parts of many religions, but did so gradually enough and subtly enough that a significant fraction of a percent of the population really, truly believes it. If religious people are trying to tiptoe around landmines of irrationality and if you want to warn them about this, talking about the FSM is like showing them a crayon cartoon of an explosion, whereas talking about Mormonism is like showing them a gory video of a sympathetic victim.
But whereas exposing other religions to Mormonism (not just the Book of Mormon; you really need the whole context) can be enlightening, I think it's nearly worthless as an abstract rationalism-improving topic for LW. A room full of atheists is not the right venue for a wit-sharpening intense debate about any religion; what you'd probably get instead is a dogpile against anyone who took the minority view, interspersed with rounds of self-congratulation about how great our shooting skills must be to have hit nearly all the fish in that barrel.
If you're interested in irrational bits in the Book of Mormon for some concrete rather than abstract reason, on the other hand, you might as well skip ahead to the notes in the back of the book: Skeptic's Annotated Book of Mormon
What do you find exaggerated about Mormonism? It looks pretty typical to me.
You seem to say that you have seen exposure to Mormonism have an effect on other religious people. Is there a record of this somewhere?
I have little interest in discussing fantasy as though it were reality, and I don't think it's appropriate for or relevant to LW.
This perspective is classically biased, I'm afraid to say. :/ I agree with you (now, given other's comments) that it may not be an appropriate conversation to ask LW to host.... but if you write off the possibility of its veracity as "fantasy" before studying the material, you are exhibiting a preconceived notion independent of the data. It's like when Einstein wrote off quantum mechanics as "too weird".
The universe acts just as we would expect a mechanistic, material universe to act. I have seen the argument you made in other comment threads, and I find it too weak to be worth much consideration. You suggest that God exists (along with heaven, souls, etc.). The only direct impact those entities seem to have on the universe, though, is the presence of a few vaguely-stated tidbits in a book that can be charitably interpreted to have been uncommon knowledge at the time they were written down. Notably, they were written down in connection to previous books which contain vast historical and factual inaccuracies and are better understood as mythology rather than revelation. This simply is not very convincing.
Then be unconvinced. But if you write off an argument as "fantasy", instead of going through the mandatory "theory which exhibits an order-of-epsilon chance of being true", then it speaks of a bias in your mind.
I don't mean to fall into But There's Still A Chance, Right?; I believe that the LDS faith has exhibited much more than an order-of-epsilon chance of truth. But then, we have different opinions about the weights of our priors.
Religious texts are works of fantasy. That's just the most parsimonious description, currently. It fits the known evidence and pays rent much better than the postulation of an omnipotent entity that acts only in vague, constrained, idiosyncratic, and generally worthless ways (along with other entities that find just as little if not less justification in the evidence). It would be "writing off" if I declared it to be the case a priori, but as I said above, I've seen the opposing arguments.
Story resolution: Arandur and I will discuss the Book of Mormon together with an atheist columnist friend of mine, practicing Examining Your Belief's Real Weak Points, Crisis of Faith, etc, etc. Problem solved.
It's been a while, has this been carried out by now? If so, how did it go?