= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Endovior comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (604)
This argument really isn't very good. It works on precisely none of the religious people I know, because:
A: They don't believe that God would tell them to do anything wrong.
B: They believe in Satan, who they are quite certain would tell them to do something wrong.
C: They also believe that Satan can lie to them and convincingly pretend to be God.
Accordingly, any voice claiming to be God and also telling them to do something they feel is evil must be Satan trying to trick them, and is disregarded. They actually think like that, and can quote relevant scripture to back their position, often from memory. This is probably better than a belief framework that would let them go out and start killing people if the right impulse struck them, but it's also not a worldview that can be moved by this sort of argument.
My experience is that this framework is not consistently applied, though.
For example, I've tried pointing out that it follows from these beliefs that if our moral judgments reject what we've been told is the will of God then we ought to obey our moral judgments and reject what we've been told is the will of God. The same folks who have just used this framework to reject treating something reprehensible as an expression of the will of God will turn around and tell me that it's not my place to judge God's will.
Yeah, that happens too. Best argument I've gotten in support of the position is that they feel that they are able to reasonably interpret the will of God through scripture, and thus instructions 'from God' that run counter to that must be false. So it's not quite the same as their own moral intuition vs a divine command, but their own scriptural learning used as a factor to judge the authenticity of a divine command.