lessdazed comments on Rationality Quotes November 2011 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 01 November 2011 06:28PM

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Comment author: HonoreDB 04 November 2011 07:01:52PM *  7 points [-]

I'm all for appropriating religious language for fun, but the kind of argument David Brin makes strikes me as unhygienic. Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you've decided on ahead of time is sinful, and I feel would actually be seen as disrespectful by most Christians. Jews like Brin do it all the time, but they're a minority.

Compare the Creationist who writes that the theory of evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. She literally doesn't care whether she's right, since it's not her true rejection, and that makes her paper more annoying to scientists than if she'd just quoted her own sacred text.

Comment author: lessdazed 05 November 2011 04:13:23AM *  6 points [-]

Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you've decided on ahead of time is sinful, as it is written: "And in the eleventh year, in the month Bul, which is the eighth month, was the house finished throughout all the parts thereof, and according to all the fashion of it. So was he seven years in building it."

http://www.randombiblequotes.com/

Comment author: Mass_Driver 06 November 2011 07:03:21AM 5 points [-]

That's sloppy, even for a random quote. The immediately preceding verse is "The foundation of the temple of the LORD was laid in the fourth year, in the month of Ziv."

11 - 7 = 4.

Whatever the flaws of the book of First Kings, failures of basic arithmetic in the literal text isn't one of them.