Douglas_Knight comments on A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies - Less Wrong

113 Post author: Yvain 13 May 2009 10:51PM

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Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 15 May 2009 02:31:36PM 0 points [-]

Not sure; I have not watched the bloggingheads debate.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 15 May 2009 02:57:56PM 2 points [-]

Me, neither. I'm just guessing based on, say, this post.

What I meant is that is that religion is a controversial question that doesn't matter, either. As Daniel Burfoot said, religion has been banished to a separate magisterium in which it barely gets to talk about the world, while political correctness is largely focused on talking about the world. This says nothing about the absolute importance of dealing with either.

Elsewhere on the thread, you say that the costs outweigh the benefits, which is a very different claim than saying it doesn't matter. If the costs and benefits are small, then everyone should agree it doesn't matter, but if the costs and benefits are large, you should expect disagreement over whether it's worth it.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 17 May 2009 03:27:59PM 2 points [-]

I personally don't believe it matters, but my cost-benefits analysis panders to those who do. And I disagree that religion doesn't matter. Sam Harris' argument:

I am terrified of what seems to me to be a bottleneck that civilization is passing through. On the one hand we have 21st-century disruptive technology proliferating, and on the other we have first-century superstition. A civilization is going to either pass through this bottleneck more or less intact or it won't. And perhaps that fear sounds grandiose, but civilizations end. On any number of occasions, some generation has witnessed the ruination of everything they and their ancestors had built. What especially terrifies me about religious thinking is the expectation on the part of many that civilization is bound to end based on prophecy and its ending is going to be glorious.

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