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I like your post (and totally agree with the first paragraph), but have some concerns that are a little different from Bugmaster's.
What's the exact difference between a god and a demon? Suppose Wicca is run by a supernatural being (let's call her Astarte) who asks her followers to follow commendable moral rules, grants their petitions when expressed in the ritualistic form of spells, and insists she will reward the righteous and punishes the wicked. You worship a different supernatural being who also asks His followers to follow commendable moral rules, grants their petitions when expressed in the ritualistic form of prayer, and insists He will reward the righteous and punish the wicked. If both Jehovah and Astarte exist and act similarly, why name one "a god" and the other "a demon"? Really, the only asymmetry seems to be that Jehovah tries to inflict eternal torture on people who prefer Astarte, where Astarte has made no such threats among people who prefer Jehovah, which is honestly advantage Astarte. So why not just say "Of all the supernatural beings out there, some people prefer this one and other people prefer that one"?
I mean, one obvious answer is certainly to list the ways Jehovah is superior to Astarte - the one created the Universe, the other merely lives in it; the one is all-powerful, the other merely has some magic; the one is wise and compassionate, the other evil and twisted. But all of these are Jehovah's assertions. One imagines Astarte makes different assertions to her followers. The question is whose claims to believe.
Jehovah has a record of making claims which seem to contradict the evidence from other sources - the seven-day creation story, for example. And He has a history of doing things which, when assessed independently of their divine origin, we would consider immoral - the Massacre of the Firstborn in Exodus, or sanctioning the rape, enslavement, infanticide, and genocide of the Canaanites. So it doesn't seem obvious at all that we should trust His word over Astarte's, especially since you seem to think that Astarte's main testable claim - that she does magic for her followers - is true.
Now, you've already said that you believe in Christianity because of direct personal revelation - a sense of serenity and rightness when you hear its doctrines, and a sense of repulsion from competing religions, and that this worked even when you didn't know what religion you were encountering and so could not bias the result. I upvoted you when you first posted this because I agree that such feelings could provide some support for religious belief. But that was before you said you believed in competing supernatural beings. Surely you realize how difficult a situation that puts you in?
Giving someone a weak feeling of serenity or repulsion is, as miracles go, not a very flashy one. One imagines it would take only simple magic, and should be well within the repertoire of even a minor demon or spirit. And you agree that Astarte performs minor miracles of the same caliber all the time to try to convince her own worshippers. So all that your feelings indicate is that some supernatural being is trying to push you toward Christianity. If you already believe that there are multiple factions of supernatural beings, some of whom push true religions and others of whom push false ones, then noticing that some supernatural being is trying to push you toward Christianity provides zero extra evidence that Christianity is true.
Why should you trust the supernatural beings who have taken an interest in your case, as opposed to the supernatural beings apparently from a different faction who caused the seemingly miraculous revelations in this person and this person's lives?
Since you use the names Jehovah and Astarte, I'll follow suit, though they're not the names I prefer.
The difference would be that if worship of Jehovah gets you eternal life in heaven, and worship of Astarte gets you eternal torture and damnation, then you should worship Jehovah and not Astarte. Also, if Astarte knows this, but pretends otherwise, then Astarte's a liar.
Not quite. I only believe in "multiple factions of supernatural beings" (actually only two) because it's implied by Christianity being true. It's not a prior belief. If Christianity is false, one or two or fifteen or zero omnipotent or slightly-powerful or once-human or monstrous gods could exist, but if Christianity is false I'd default to atheism, since if my evidence for Christianity proved false (say, I hallucinated it all because of some undiagnosed mental illness that doesn't resemble any currently-known mental illness and only causes that one symptom) without my gaining additional evidence for some other religion or non-atheist cosmology, I'd have no evidence for anything spiritual. Or do I misunderstand? I'm confused.
Being, singular, first of all.
I already know myself, what kind of a person I am. I know how rational I am. I know how non-crazy I am. I know exactly the extent to which I've considered illness affecting my thoughts as a possible explanation.
I know I'm not lying.
The first person became an apostate, something I've never done, and is still confused years later. The second person records only the initial conversion, while I know how it's played out in my own life for several years.
The second person is irrationally turned off by even the mere appearance of Catholicism and Christianity in general because of terrible experiences with Catholics.
I discount all miracle stories from people I don't know, including Christian and Jewish miracle stories, which could at least plausibly be true. I discount them ALL when I don't know the person. In fact, that means MOST of the stories I hear and consider unlikely (without passing judgment when I have so little info) are stories that, if true, essentially imply Christianity, while others would provide evidence for it.
And knowing how my life has gone, I know how I've changed as a person since accepting Jesus, or Jehovah if that's the word you prefer. They don't mention drastic changes to their whole personalities to the point of near-unrecognizability even to themselves. In brief: I was unbelievably awful. I was cruel, hateful, spiteful, vengeful and not a nice person. I was actively hurtful toward everyone, including immediate family. After finding Jesus, I slowly became a less horrible person, until I got to where I am now. Self-evaluation may be somewhat unreliable, but I think the lack of any physical violence recently is a good sign. Also, rather than escalating arguments as far as possible, when I realize I've lashed out, I deliberately make an effort not to fall prey to consistency bias and defend my actions, but to stop and apologize and calm down. That's something I would not have done-- would not have WANTED to do, would not have thought was a good idea, before.
I don't know (I only guess) what Astarte does to xyr worshipers. I'm conjecturing; I've never prayed to xem, nor have I ever been a Wiccan or any other type of non-Christian religion. But I think I ADBOC this statement; if said by me, it would have sounded more like "Satan makes xyrself look very appealing".
(I'm used to a masculine form for this being. You're using a feminine form. Rather than argue, I've simply shifted my pronoun usage to an accurate-- possibly more accurate-- and less loaded set of pronouns.)
Also, my experience suggests that if something is good or evil, and you're open to the knowledge, you'll see through any lies or illusions with time. It might be a lot of time-- I'll confess I recently got suckered into something for, I think, a couple of years, when I really ought to have known better much sooner, and no, I don't want to talk about it-- but to miss it forever requires deluding yourself.
(Not, as we all know, that self-delusion is particularly rare...)
That someone is trying to convince me to be a Christian or that I perceive the nature of things using an extra sense.
Strength varies. Around the time I got to the fourth Surah of the Koran, it was much flashier than anything I've seen since, including everything previously described (on the negative side) at incredible strength plus an olfactory hallucination. And the result of, I think, two days straight of Bible study and prayer at all times constantly... well, that was more than a weak feeling of serenity. But on its own it'd be pretty weak evidence, because I was only devoting so much time to prayer because my state of mind was so volatile and my thoughts and feelings were unreliable. It's only repetitions of that effect that let me conclude that it means what I've already listed, after controlling for other possibilities that are personal so I don't want to talk about it. Those are rare extremes, though; normally it's not as flashy as those.
I consider it way likelier than you do, anyway. I'm only around fiftyish percent confidence here. But that's only one aspect of it. Their religion also claims to cause changes in its followers along the lines of "more in tune with the Divine" or something, right? So if there are any overlapping claims about morality, that would also be testable-- NOT absolute morality of the followers, but change in morality on mutually-believed-in traits, measuring before and after conversion, then a year on, then a few years on, then several years on. Of course, I'm not sure how you'll ever get the truth about how moral people are when they think no one's watching...
Sorry - I used "Astarte" and the female pronoun because the Wiccans claim to worship a Goddess, and Astarte was the first female demon I could think of. If we're going to go gender-neutral, I recommend "eir", just because I think it's the most common gender neutral pronoun on this site and there are advantages to standardizing this sort of thing.
Well, okay, but this seems to be an argument from force, sort of "Jehovah is a god and Astarte a demon because if I say anything else, Jehovah will torture me". It seems to have the same form as "Stalin is not a tyrant, because if I call Stalin a tyrant, he will kill me, and I don't want that!"
It sounds like you're saying the causal history of your belief should affect the probability of it being true.
Suppose before you had any mystical experience, you had non-zero probabilities X of atheism, Y of Christianity (in which God promotes Christianity and demons promote non-Christian religions like Wicca), and Z of any non-Christian religion (in which God promotes that religion and demons promote Christianity).
Then you experience an event which you interpret as evidence for a supernatural being promoting Christianity. This should raise the probability of Y and Z an equal amount, since both theories seem to equally predict this would happen.
You could still end up a Christian if you started off with a higher probability Y than Z, but it sounds like you weren't especially interested in Christianity before your mystical experience, and the prior for Z is higher than Y since there are so many more non-Christian than Christian religions.
I understand you as having two categories of objections: first, objections that the specific people in the Islamic conversion stories are untrustworthy or their stories uninteresting (3,4,6). Second, that you find mystical experiences by other people inherently hard to believe but you believe your own because you are a normal sane person (1,2,5).
The first category of objections apply only to those specific people's stories. That's fair enough since those were the ones I presented, but they were the ones I presented because they were the first few good ones I found in the vast vast vast vast VAST Islamic conversion story literature. I assume that if you were to list your criteria for believability, we could eventually find some Muslim who experienced a seemingly miraculous conversion who fit all of those criteria (including changing as a person) - if it's important to you to test this, we can try.
The second category of objections is more interesting. Different studies show somewhere from a third to half of Americans having mystical experiences, including about a third of non-religious people who have less incentive to lie. Five percent of people experience them "regularly". Even granted that some of these people are lying and other people categorize "I felt really good" as a mystical experience, I don't think denying that these occur is really an option.
The typical view that people need to be crazy, or on the brink of death, or uneducated, or something other than a normal middle class college-educated WASP adult in order to have mystical experiences also breaks down before the evidence. According to Greeley 1975 and Hay and Morisy 1976, well-educated upper class people are more likely to have mystical experiences, and Hay and Morisy 1978 found that people with mystical experiences are more likely to be mentally well-balanced.
Since these experiences occur with equal frequency among people of all religion and even atheists, I continue to think this supports either the "natural mental process" idea or the "different factions of demons" idea - you can probably guess which one I prefer :)
There are 1.57 billion Muslims and 2.2 billion Christians in the world. Barring something very New-Agey going on, at least one of those groups believes an evil lie. The number of Muslims who convert to Christianity at some point in their lives, or vice versa, is only a tiny fraction of a percent. So either only a tiny fraction of a percent of people are open to the knowledge - so tiny that you could not reasonably expect yourself to be among them - or your experience has just been empirically disproven.
(PS: You're in a lot of conversations at once - let me know if you want me to drop this discussion, or postpone it for later)
Speaking of mystical experiences, my religion tutor at the university (an amazing woman, Christian but pretty rational and liberal) had one, as she told us, in transport one day, and that's when she converted, despite growing up at an atheistic middle-class Soviet family.
Oh, and the closest thing I ever had to one was when I tried sensory deprivation + dissociatives (getting high on cough syrup, then submersing myself in a warm bath with lights out and ears plugged; had a timer set to 40 minutes and a thin ray of light falling where I could see it by turning my head as precaution against, y'know, losing myself). That experiment was both euphoric and interesting, but I wouldn't really want to repeat it. I experienced blissful ego death and a feeling of the universe spinning round and round in cycles, around where I would be, but where now was nothing. It's hard to describe.
And then, well, I saw the tiny, shining shape of Rei Ayanami. She was standing in her white plugsuit amidst the blasted ruins on a dead alien world, and I got the feeling that she was there to restore it to life. She didn't look at me, but I knew she knew I saw her. Then it was over.
Fret not, I didn't really make any more bullshit out of that, but it's certainly an awesome moment to remember.
Unless I know them already. Once I already know people for honest, normal, sane people ("normal" isn't actually required and I object to the typicalist language), their miracle stories have the same weight as my own. Also, miracles of more empirically-verifiable sorts are believable when vetted by snopes.com.
Xe is poetic and awesome. I'm hoping it'll become standard English. To that end, I use it often.
I read your first link and I'm very surprised because I didn't expect something like that. It would be interesting to talk to that person about this.
Is that surprising? First of all, I know that I already converted to Christianity, rather than just having assumed it always, so I'm already more likely to be open to new facts. And second, I thought it was common knowledge around these parts that most people are really, really bad at finding the truth. How many people know Bayes? How many know what confirmation bias is? Anchoring? The Litany of Tarski? Don't people on this site rail against how low the sanity waterline is? I mean, you don't disagree that I'm more rational than most Christians and Muslims, right?
Do they do this by using tricks like Multiheaded described? Or by using mystical plants or meditation? (I know there are Christians who think repeating a certain prayer as a mantra and meditating on it for a long time is supposed to work... and isn't there, or wasn't there, some Islamic sect where people try to find God by spinning around?) If so, that really doesn't count. Is there another study where that question was asked? Because if you're asserting that mystical experiences can be artificially induced by such means in most if not all people, then we're in agreement.
I was thinking more along the lines of "going to hell is a natural consequence of worshiping Astarte", analogous to "if I listen to my peers and smoke pot, I won't be able to sing, whereas if I listen to my mother and drink lots of water, I will; therefore, my mother is right and listening to my peers is bad". I hadn't even considered it from that point of view before.
To return to something I pointed out far, far back in this thread, this is not analagous. Your mother does not cause you to lose your voice for doing the things she advises you not to do. On the other hand, you presumably believe that god created hell, or at a minimum, he tolerates its existence (unless you don't think God is omnipotent).
(As an aside, another point against the homogeneity you mistakenly assumed you would find on Lesswrong when you first showed up is that not everyone here is a complete moral anti-realist. For me, that one cannot hold the following three premises without contradiction is sufficient to discount any deeper argument for Christianity:
Resorting to, "Well, I don't actually know what hell is" is blatant rationalization.)
You don't actually need to be a moral realist to make that argument; you just need to notice the tension between the set of behavior implied by the Christian God's traditional attributes and the set of behavior Christian tradition claims for him directly. That in itself implies either a contradiction or some very sketchy use of language (i.e. saying that divine justice allows for infinitely disproportionate retribution).
I think it's a weakish argument against anything less than a strictly literalist interpretation of the traditions concerning Hell, though. There are versions of the redemption narrative central to Christianity that don't necessarily involve torturing people for eternity: the simplest one that I know of says that those who die absent a state of grace simply cease to exist ("everlasting life" is used interchangeably with "heaven" in the Bible), although there are interpretations less problematic than that as well.
The (modern) Orthodox opinion that my tutor relayed to us is that Hell isn't a place at all, but a condition of the soul where it refuses to perceive/accept God's grace at all and therefore shuts itself out from everything true and meaningful that can be, just wallowing in despair; it exists in literally no-where, as all creation is God's, and the refusal of God is the very essence of this state. She dismissed all suggestions of sinners' "torture" in hell - especially by demonic entities - as folk religion.
(Wait, what's that, looks like either I misquoted her a little or she didn't quite give the official opinion...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_in_Christian_beliefs#Eastern_Orthodox_concepts_of_hell
I has a confused.
I've heard that one too, but I'm not sure how functionally different from pitchforks and brimstone I'd consider it to be, especially in light of the idea of a Last Judgment common to Christianity and Islam.
Oh, there's a difference alright, one that could be cynically interpreted as an attempt to dodge the issue of cruel and disproportionate punishment by theologians. The version above suggests that God doesn't ever actively punish anyone at all, He simply refuses to force His way to someone who rejects him, even if they suffer as a result. That's sometimes assumed to be due to God's respect for free will.
Yeah. Thing is, we're dealing with an entity who created the system and has unbounded power within it. Respect for free will is a pretty good excuse, but given that it's conceivable for a soul to be created that wouldn't respond with permanent and unspeakable despair to separation from the Christian God (or to the presence of a God whom the soul has rejected, in the other scenario), making souls that way looks, at best, rather irresponsible.
If I remember right the standard response to that is to say that human souls were created to be part of a system with God at its center, but that just raises further questions.
What, so god judges that eternal torture is somehow preferable to violating someones free will by inviting them to eutopia?
I am so tired of theists making their god so unable to be falsified that he becomes useless. Let's assume for a moment that some form of god actually exists. I don't care how much he loves us in his own twisted little way, I can think of 100 ways to improve the world and he isn't doing any of them. It seems to me that we ought to be able to do better than what god has done, and in fact we have.
The standard response to theists postulating a god should be "so what?".
No, I suppose it's not surprising. I guess I misread the connotations of your claim. Although I am still not certain I agree: I know some very rational and intelligent Christians, and some very rational and intelligent atheists (I don't really know many Muslims, so I can't say anything about them). At some point I guess this statement is true by definition, since we can define open-minded as "open-minded enough to convert religion if you have good enough evidence to do so." But I can't remember where we were going with this one so I'll shut up about it.
I was unable to find numerical data on this. I did find some assertions in the surveys that some of the mystical experience was untriggered, I found one study comparing 31 people with triggered mystical experience to 31 people with untriggered mystical experience (suggesting it's not too hard to get a sample of the latter), and I have heard anecdotes from people I know about having untriggered mystical experience.
Honestly I had never really thought of that as an important difference. Keep in mind that it's really weird that the brain responds to relatively normal stressors, like fasting or twirling or staying still for two long, by producing this incredible feeling of union with God. Think of how surprising this would be if you weren't previously aware of it, how complex a behavior this is, as opposed to something simpler like falling unconscious. The brain seems to have this built-in, surprising tendency to have mystical experiences, which can be triggered by a lot of different things.
As someone in the field of medicine, this calls to mind the case of seizures, another unusual mental event which can be triggered in similar conditions. Doctors have this concept called the "seizure threshold". Some people have low seizure thresholds, other people high seizure thresholds. Various events - taking certain drugs, getting certain diseases, being very stressed, even seeing flashing lights in certain patterns - increases your chance of having a seizure, until it passes your personal seizure threshold and you have one. And then there are some people - your epileptics - who can just have seizures seemingly out of nowhere in the course of everyday life (another example is that some lucky people can induce orgasm at will, whereas most of us only achieve orgasm after certain triggers).
I see mystical experiences as working a lot like seizures - anyone can have one if they experience enough triggers, and some people experience them without any triggers at all. It wouldn't be at all parsimonous to say that some people have this reaction when they skip a few meals, or stay in the dark, or sit very still, and other people have this reaction when they haven't done any of these things, but these are caused by two completely different processes.
I mean, if we already know that dreaming up mystical experiences is the sort of thing the brain does in some conditions, it's a lot easier to expand that to "and it also does that in other conditions" than to say "but if it happens in other conditions, it is proof of God and angels and demons and an entire structure of supernatural entities."
The (relatively sparse) Biblical evidence suggests an active role of God in creating Hell and damning people to it. For example:
"This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." (Matthew 13:49)
"Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels!" (Matthew 25:41)
"If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, that person was thrown into the lake of fire." (Revelations 20:15)
"God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment" (2 Peter 2:4)
"Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him." (Luke 12:5)
That last one is particularly, um, pleasant. And it's part of why it is difficult for me to see a moral superiority of Jehovah over Astarte: of the one who's torturing people eternally, over the one who fails to inform you that her rival is torturing people eternally.
If you can say more about why deliberately induced mystical experiences don't count, but other kinds do, I'd be interested.
For the same reason that if I had a see-an-image-of-Grandpa button, and pushed it, I wouldn't count the fact that I saw him as evidence that he's somehow still alive, but if I saw him right now spontaneously, I would.
Imagine that you have a switch in your home which responds to your touch by turning on a lamp (this probably won't take much imagination). One day this lamp, which was off, suddenly and for no apparent reason turns on. Would you assign supernatural or mundane causes to this event?
Now this isn't absolute proof that the switch wasn't turned on by something otherworldly; perhaps it responds to both mundane and supernatural causes. But, well, if I may be blunt, Occam's Razor. If your best explanations are "the Hand of Zeus" and "Mittens, my cat," then ...
I assume much the same things about this as any other sense: it's there to give information about the world, but trickable. I mean, how tired you feel is a good measure of how long it's been since you've slept, but you can drink coffee and end up feeling more energetic than is merited. So if I want to be able to tell how much sleep I really need, I should avoid caffeine. That doesn't mean the existence of caffeine makes your subjective feelings of your own energy level arbitrary or worthless.
Unfortunately, the example you're drawing the analogy to is just as unclear to me as the original example I'd requested an explanation of.
I mean, I agree that seeing an image of my dead grandfather isn't particularly strong evidence that he's alive. Indeed, I see images of dead relatives on a fairly regular basis, and I continue to believe that they're dead. But I think that's equally true whether I deliberately invoked such an image, or didn't.
I get that you think it is evidence that he's alive when the image isn't deliberately invoked, and I can understand how the reason for that would be the same as the reason for thinking that a mystical experience "counts" when it isn't deliberately invoked, but I am just as unclear about what that reason is as I was to start with.
If I suddenly saw my dead grandpa standing in front of me, that would be sufficiently surprising that I'd want an explanation. It's not sufficiently strong to make me believe by itself, but I'd say hello and see if he answered, and if he sounded like my grandpa, and then tell him he looks like someone I know and see the reaction, and if he reacts like Grandpa, I touch him to ascertain that he's corporeal, then invite him to come chat with me until I wake up, and assuming that everything else seems non-dream-like (I'll eventually have to read something, providing an opportunity to test whether or not I'm dreaming, plus I can try comparing physics to how they should be, perhaps by trying to fly), I'd tell my mom he's here.
Whereas if I had such a button, I'd ignore the image, because it wouldn't be surprising. I suppose looking at photographs is kind of like the button.
Well, wait up. Now you're comparing two conditions with two variables, rather than one.
That is, not only is grandpa spontaneous in case A and button-initiated in case B, but also grandpa is a convincing corporeal fascimile of your grandpa in case A and not any of those things in case B. I totally get how a convincing fascimile of grandpa would "count" where an unconvincing image wouldn't (and, by analogy, how a convincing mystical experience would count where an unconvincing one wouldn't) but that wasn't the claim you started out making.
Suppose you discovered a button that, when pressed, created something standing in front of you that looked like your dead grandpa , sounded and reacted like your grandpa, chatted with you like you believe your grandpa would, etc. Would you ignore that?
It seems like you're claiming that you would, because it wouldn't be surprising... from which I infer that mystical experiences have to be surprising to count (which had been my original question, after all). But I'm not sure I properly understood you.
For my own part, if I'm willing to believe that my dead grandpa can come back to life at all, I can't see why the existence of a button that does this routinely should make me less willing to believe it .
The issue is that there is not a reliable "see-an-image-of-Grandpa button" in existence for mystical experiences. In other words, I'm unaware of any techniques that reliably induce mystical experiences. Since there are no techniques for reliably inducing mystical experiences, there is no basis for rejecting some examples of mystical experience as "unnatural/artificial mystical experiences."
As an aside, if you are still interested in evaluating readings, I would be interested in your take on this one
Now you're aware of one.
yes
Yes: Dervishes.
Actually, I do. You use the language that rationalists use. However, you don't seem to have considered very many alternate hypothesis. And you don't seem to have performed any of the obvious tests to make sure you're actually getting information out of your evidence.
For instance, you could have just cut up a bunch of similarly formatted stories from different sources, (or even better, have had a third party do it for you, so you don't see it,) stuck them in a box and pulled them out at random - sorting them into Bible and non-Bible piles according to your feelings. If you were getting the sort of information out that would go some way towards justifying your beliefs, you should easily beat random people of equal familiarity with the Bible.
Rationality is a tool, and if someone doesn't use it, then it doesn't matter how good a tool they have; they're not a rationalist any more than someone who owns a gun is a soldier. Rationalists have to actually go out and gather/analyse the data.
(Edit to change you to someone for clarity's sake.)
No, I couldn't have for two reasons. By the time I could have thought of it I would have recognized nearly all the Bible passages as Biblical and to obscure meaning would require such short quotes I'd never be able to tell. Those are things I already explained-- you know, in the post where I said we should totally test this, using a similar experiment.
If that's the stance you're going to take, it seems destructive to the idea that I should consider you rational. You proposed a test to verify your belief that could not be performed; in the knowledge that, if it was, it would give misleading results.
Minor points: There's more than just one bible out there. Unless you're a biblical scholar, the odds that there's nothing from a bible that you haven't read are fairly slim.
'nearly all' does leave you with some testable evidence. The odds that it just happens to be too short a test for your truth-sensing faculty to work are, I think, fairly slim.
People tend not to have perfect memories. Even if you are a biblical scholar the odds are that you will make mistakes in this, as you would in anything else, and information gained from the intuitive faculty would be expressed as a lower error rate than like-qualified people.
ETA quote.
Similar test. Not the same test. It was a test that, though still flawed, fixed those two things I could see immediately (and in doing so created other problems).
Want to test this?
I don't see that it would have fixed those things. We could, perhaps, come up with a more useful test if we discussed it on a less hostile footing. But, at the moment, I'm not getting a whole lot of info out of the exchange and don't think it worth arguing with you over quite why your test wouldn't work, since we both agree that it wouldn't.
Not really. It's not that sort of thing where the outputs of the test would have much value for me. I could easily get 100% of the quotes correct by sticking them into google, as could you. The only answers we could accept with any significant confidence would be the ones we didn't think the other person was likely to lie about.
My beliefs in respect to claims about the supernatural are held with a high degree of confidence, and pushing them some tiny distance towards the false end of the spectrum is not worth the hours I would have to invest.
You've stated that you judge morality on a consequentialist basis. Now you state that going to hell is somehow not equivalent to god torturing you for eternity. What gives?
Also: You believe in god because your belief in god implies that you really ought to believe in god? What? Is that circular or recursivly justified? If the latter, please explain.
Or perhaps neither Jehovah nor Astarte knows now who will dominate in the end, and any promises either makes to any followers are, ahem, over-confident? :-) There was a line I read somewhere about how all generals tell their troops that their side will be victorious...
So you're assuming both sides are in a duel, and that the winner will send xyr worshipers to heaven and the loser's worshipers to hell? Because I was not.
Only Jehovah. He says that he's going to send his worshipers to heaven and Astarte's to hell. Astarte says neither Jehovah nor she will send anyone anywhere. Either one could be a liar, or they could be in a duel and each describing what happens if xe wins.
Only as a hypothetical possibility. (From such evidence as I've seen I don't think either really exists. And I have seen a fair number of Wiccan ceremonies - which seem like reasonably decent theater, but that's all.) One could construe some biblical passages as predicting some sort of duel - and if one believed those passages, and that interpretation, then the question of whether one side was overstating its chances would be relevant.
Hidden cameras help. So do setups like "leave a dollar, take a bagel" left in the office kitchen.
That's a great idea! Now if only we could randomly assign people to convert to either Wicca or Christianity, we'd be all set. Unfortunately...
It's not exactly rigorous, but you could try leaving bagels at Christian and Wiccan gatherings of approximately the same size and see how many dollars you get back.
That's an idea, but you'd need to know how they started out. If generally nice people joined one religion and stayed the same, and generally horrible people joined the other and became better people, they might look the same on the bagel test.
True. You could control for that by seeing if established communities are more or less prone to stealing bagels than younger ones, but that would take a lot more data points.
Indeed. Or you could test the people themselves individually. What if you got a bunch of very new converts to various religions, possibly more than just Christianity and Wicca, and tested them on the bagels and gave them a questionnaire containing some questions about morals and some about their conversion and some decoys to throw them off, then called them back again every year for the same tests, repeating for several years?
I don't really trust self-evaluation for questions like this, unfortunately -- it's too likely to be confounded by people's moral self-image, which is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to be affected by a religious conversion. Bagels would still work, though.
Actually, if I was designing a study like this I think I'd sign a bunch of people up ostensibly for longitudial evaluation on a completely different topic -- and leave a basket of bagels in the waiting room.
Hm, you'd probably want the bagels to be off in a small side room so that the patients can feel alone while considering whether or not to steal one.
What about a study ostensibly of the health of people who convert to new religions? Bagels in the waiting room, new converts, random not-too-unpleasant medical tests for no real reason? Repeat yearly?
The moral questionnaire would be interesting because people's own conscious ethics might reflect something cool and if you're gonna test it anyway... but on the other hand, yeah. I don't trust them to evaluate how moral they are, either. But if people signal what they believe is right, then that means you do know what they think is good. You could use that to see a shift from no morals at all to believing morals are right and good to have. And just out of curiosity, I'd like to see if they shifted from deontologist to consequentialist ethics, or vice versa.
We'll have to ask how God and Santa Claus manage to pull it off.
Maybe I'm lacking context, but I'm not sure why you bring this up. Has anyone here described religious beliefs as being characteristically caused by mental illness? I'd be concerned if they had, since such a statement would be (a) incorrect and (b) stigmatizing.
In this post, Eliezer characterized John C. Wright's conversion to Catholicism as the result of a temporal lobe epileptic fit and said that at least some (not sure if he meant all) religious experiences were "brain malfunctions."
Interesting that this post has been downvoted. Care to explain? It seems to me that I am straightforwardly answering a question.
The relevant category is probably not explanations for religious beliefs, but rather explanations of experiences such as AK has reported of what, for lack of a better term, I will call extrasensory perception. Most of the people I know who have religious beliefs don't report extrasensory perception, and most of the people I know who report extrasensory perception don't have religious beliefs. (Though of the people I know who do both, a reasonable number ascribe a causal relationship between them. The direction varies.)
You are. That's the main alternate explanation I can think of.
But, mental illness is not required to experience strong, odd feelings or even to "hear voices". Fully-functional human brains can easily generate such things.
Religious experience isn't usually pathologized in the mainstream (academically or by laypeople) unless it makes up part of a larger pattern of experience that's disruptive to normal life, but that doesn't say much one way or another about LW's attitude toward it.
My experience with LW's attitude has been similar, though owing to a different reason. Religion generally seems to be treated here as the result of cognitive bias, same as any number of other poorly setup beliefs.
Though LW does tend to use the word "insane" in a way that includes any kind of irrational cognition, I so far have interpreted that to mostly be slang, not meant to literally imply that all irrational cognition is mental illness (although the symptoms of many mental illnesses can be seen as a subset of irrational cognition).
Not having certain irrational biases can be said to be a subset of mental illness.
How so? I can only think of Straw Vulcan examples. (Or, by "can be said", do you mean to imply that you disagree with the statement?)
A subset of those diagnosed or diagnosable with high functioning autism and a subset of the features that constitute that label fit this category. Being rational is not normal.
I don't affiliate myself with the DSM, nor does it always representative of an optimal way of carving reality. In this case I didn't want to specify one way or the other.
Things like more accurate self-evaluations by depressed people.
Obviously I can't speak for AK, but maybe she believes that she has been epistemically lucky. Compare the religious case:
"I had this experience which gave me evidence for divinity X, so I am going to believe in X. Others have had analogous experiences for divinities Y and Z, but according to the X religion I adopted those are demonic, so Y and Z believers are wrong. I was lucky though, since if I had had a Y experience I would have become a Y believer".
with philosophical cases like the ones Alicorn discusses there:
"I accept philosophical position X because of compelling arguments I have been exposed to. Others have been exposed to seemingly compelling arguments for positions Y and Z, but according to X these arguments are flawed, so Y and Z believers are wrong. I was lucky though, since if I had gone to a university with Y teachers I would have become a Y believer".
It may be that the philosopher is also being irrational here and that she could strive more to trascend her education and assess X vs Y impartially, but in the end it is impossible to escape this kind of irrationality at all levels at once and assess beliefs from a perfect vaccuum. We all find some things compelling and not others because of the kind of people we are and the kind of lives we have lived, and the best we can get is reflective equilibrium. Recursive justification hitting bottom and all that.
The question is whether AK is already in reflective equilibrium or if she can still profit from some meta-examination and reassess this part of her belief system. (I believe that some religious believers have reflected enough about their beliefs and the counterarguments to them that they are in this kind of equilibrium and there is no further argument from an atheist that can rationally move them - though these are a minority and not representative of typical religious folks.)
See my response here - if Alicorn is saying she knows the other side has arguments exactly as convincing as those which led her to her side, but she is still justified to continue believing her side more likely than the other, I disagree with her.