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MugaSofer comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
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Comments (1750)
Welcome to LessWrong!
Good for you! You might want to watch out for assuming that everyone had a similar experience with religion; many theists will fin this very annoying and this seems to be a common mistake among people with your background-type.
Huh. I must say, I found the GD pretty terrible (despite reading it multiple times to be sure,) although I suppose that powder-keg aspect probably accounts for most of your conversion (deconversion?)
I'm curious, could you expand on what you found so convincing in The God Delusion?
I think we can all say that :)
Thank you! :)
I apologize. I had no idea I was making this false assumption, but I was. I'm embarrassed.
I replied to JohnH about this. I don't know if I could go into a lot of detail on why it was convincing, it was almost two years ago that I read it. But what really convinced me to start doubting my religion was when I prayed to God very passionately asking him whether or not The God Delusion was true and after I felt this tingly warm sensation telling me it was. I had done the same thing with The Book of Mormon multiple times and felt this same sensation, and I was told in church that this was the Holy Spirit telling me that it was true. I had been taught I could pray about anything and the Spirit would tell me whether or not it was true. After being told by the Spirit that The God Delusion was true, I decided that the only explanation is that what I thought of as the Spirit was just happening in my head and that it wasn't a sure way of finding knowledge. It was a very dramatic experience for me.
I've always wondered about that. People talk about praying for guidance and receiving it, never quite got what they were talking about before now.
Yeah, I suppose what you describe fits with it being more that the book encouraged you to reexamine your beliefs than it's arguments persuading you as such, which makes sense.
Incidentally, I can't help wondering what would you have done if the Spirit had told you it was bunk ;)
I like to think I still would have debunked Mormonism in my own mind, but maybe not! That experience was extremely important to my deconversion process, because the only reason I believed in the LDS Church was because of the Spirit telling me the Book of Mormon was true and that Jesus Christ was my Savior. As soon as the Spirit told me something so contradictory as The God Delusion was true, my whole belief structure came crumbling down.
What kind of theist are you, personal or more of the general theism (which includes deism) variety? Any holy textstring you believe has been divinely inspired?
About as Deist as you can be while still being technically Christian. I'd be inclined to say there's something in all major religions, simply for selection reasons, but the only thing I'd endorse as "divinely inspired" as such would be the New Testament? I guess? Even that is filtered by cultural context and such, obviously,.
If you can readily articulate your reasons for evaluating the New Testament differently from other scriptures, I'm interested. (It's possible that you've already done so, perhaps even in response to this question from me; feel free to point me at writeups elsewhere if you wish.)
Well, I mentioned I'm technically Christian (despite my deist leanings), right? I think the evidence in favor of Jesus being, well, the Son of God is good enough to over come my prior, although to be fair I have a significantly higher prior of such things than the LW norm, because theism. If Jesus was God, naturally anything that can be traced back to him is in some sense "divinely inspired" - so the Gospels, mostly. I'm less confident about the status of the rest of the NT, but again, probably miracles (albeit lower certainty than those of Jesus, I guess) so probably some level of Godly origin, at least for the parts that claim to have such an origin.
(nods) That answers my question. Thank you.