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Arandur comments on The Proper Use of Humility - Less Wrong
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Comments (42)
That is possible, but you didn't show it. Who knows what would happen if we gave all our shelter and money to the starving and homeless? Perhaps they'd listen if we asked for it back, or a miracle would produce more? And how do we know we aren't supposed to die of starvation and exposure?
There are certainly biblical statements implying one shouldn't. There may even be two or three pages worth of such excepts for every one page implying the opposite, but once the principle of explosions explodes you, there's really no putting the pieces back together.
If the logical demonstration depends on assuming something at all like biblical consistency, you can say so, but biblical quotes are worthless for some purposes because it may be assumed there is one supporting P and one supporting ~P for a great many things. This is true for the Old Testament alone, the New testament makes it exponentially worse, which is like having a fatal wound or disease be exponentially more fatal than fatal...I can't even imagine adding the Book of Mormon to the mix.
For this reason biblical quotes are not ideal, unless there is doubt that any passage supports a particular position, or there is some other good reason. But the default assumption is that if there is a debate, biblical quotes can be found to support any side.
In any case, one should be careful to not accept a false dichotomy that arose from a clash of two opinions, but to seek better alternatives, particularly those similar to the opposing position, and to throw away fake justifications that worked against the real interlocutor, but not the idealized one.
I thank you for your caution, but my argument was actually non-Biblical in nature, and it was a proof by contradiction. Ran something like this:
So, you think that I should give away everything to those who ask for it, without exception?
Every resource I consume is a resource that is then unavailable for others who ask for it.
Therefore, in order to give away every resource I might have otherwise consumed, I must not consume any resources, and therefore dies.
Your moral system prohibits suicide.
Therefore, your original proposition is inconsistent with your professed morality, QED.
Also therefore, get out of my house before I call the cops.
I apologize for the ambiguity; I did not mean to explicitly ascribe any moral valuation to committing suicide, though I should hope it could be inferred that I do not, in fact, advocate suicide. :P
As for "the homeless giving it back", why, to even ask would be selfish!
There is a difference between not consuming anything and giving away anything if asked.
So apparently in his religion one is supposed to give away everything if asked, but nothing is implied if one is not asked.
That is a good point, but the error comes in my statement of he problem, not in the argument. Otherwise, why would we ever give to charity, unless explicitly asked to? What would constitute "asking", anyway? Could we pass by a homeless man on the street and, as long as he didn't actually say anything to us, safely ignore his sign?
I don't understand. Mostly, because your argument is along the lines of: A, because if not A, then why B? And B," and I can think of many other reasons for B, not merely just A or just one besides A. How is this not an argument from incredulity? You're accusing the roommate of unflinching hypocrisy, but I don't see it.
Then perhaps I was incorrect in my accusation. I apologize that I'm not able to present my side more clearly; this happened a while ago, and the data is muddled.
I hadn't myself understood why I disliked one style of biblical quotations until I had to explain it to you.
Other reasons for biblical quotes are fine, such as showing how telling a story several times and differently has an effect, or showing something about how people then likely thought, or having an old source for "Nothing new under the sun", etc. There's nothing about the books that makes quoting them magically a bad thing to do, it's just that there's enough contradictory stuff (probably in Exodus or Numbers or Deuteronomy alone, much less the Pentateuch, much less the Old Testament, much less...) that saying there is Biblical warrant for something similar to one's position is the most unspectacular thing one can say. A quantity of quotes from among sources showing preponderant and/or broad and consistent would be something else and as valuable as perhaps a small quote from a dissimilar source, but by definition that's not something that fits in a reasonable amount of space and is more of a thesis paper.
The first sentence of this comment is the important one, we can probably constructively generalize from it.
As an atheist in hiding knowing the bible well can be extremely useful though. Due to how you can support nearly any position using biblical quotes, it becomes a lot easier dealing with strongly religious people when you disagree with them if you can argue based on their own priors. Telling someone about a logical fallacy, information colelcted using carbon dating, etc only works when they actually assign weight to your sources.
Another bonus, when people find out I am an atheist and I have been liberally trolling them for years it might shake up their faith in the community if I am lucky, but I am not sure how I would test this.