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wedrifid comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong
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Former christian here. Every once in a while, I catch myself about to--or worse, in the middle of--recounting an explanation like the one you just gave for which I have no evidence other than some pastor's word. On more than one of those occasions, the recalled explanation was just wrong. I haven't googled your explanation here, so it's possible that there's lots of evidence for it, but my prior for that is fairly low (it seems like a really specific piece of cultural information, and it pattern matches against "story that reinterprets well known biblical passage in a way that makes the inconvenient and obvious interpretation incorrect").
I'm incredibly pessimistic about the abilities of the average christian pastor at weighing the evidence for multiple competing historical hypotheses and coming up with the most correct answer (it's basically their job to be bad at this). I know that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but as a rule I no longer repeat things I "learned" in a church setting unless I've independently verified it.
(Oh, and: my apologies if you came by that story via a more rigorous process.)
There are specific things that pastors are required to be wrong about yet when it comes to adding mere details for the sake of little more than curiosity there is little reason to believe they would be worse than average. For most part, of course, they will be simply teaching what they were taught and theological college - the evidence weighing is done by others. This is how most people operate.
What you say is true for competent pastors. I've probably been exposed to more than my fair share of the incompetent ones.
...I noticed a long time before I deconverted that when pastors said something about a subject I knew something about, they were totally wrong some ridiculously high percentage of the time. Should have tipped me off.
I've been fortunate in as much as several of my pastors and most of my lay preachers had science degrees. Mind you I suspect I've selected out most of the bad ones since I do recall I used to spend time with my family absolutely bagging the crap out of those preachers who said silly things.