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lessdazed comments on The Proper Use of Humility - Less Wrong
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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!
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.