ibidem comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: orthonormal 01 April 2013 04:19PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 14 May 2013 09:55:36PM 0 points [-]

Oh, and since I currently have negative karma, I'm unable to directly respond to your other comments.

In response to this one:

If Mormonism is incorrect, do you want to know that?

It's a very important question and one I need to think about more. In the next few days I'll write a Discussion post addressing my beliefs, including why I'm planning not to lose my faith at the moment.

And this one:

But you haven't showed much willingness so far to discuss your reasons for your belief in which way the evidence falls or ours.

Perhaps it's not fair of me to ask for your evidence without providing any of my own. However I really don't want to just become the irrational believer hopelessly trying to convince everyone else.

rather than concluding from your experience with us that we're rigid and closed-minded on the matter, you've taken it as a premise to begin with

I didn't come here expecting people to be rigid. But when I asked people what the best arguments for theism were, they either told me that there were none, or they rehashed bad ones that are refuted easily.

Are you familiar enough with the evidence that we're prepared to bring to the table that you think you could argue it yourself?

Yes, I definitely am. In an intellectual debate I could probably defend atheism better than belief; I was originally looking for good arguments in favor of theism and I thought that you guys of all people ought to know some. Suffice it to say that I was largely wrong about that.

Comment author: Bugmaster 14 May 2013 10:14:15PM 1 point [-]

I was originally looking for good arguments in favor of theism and I thought that you guys of all people ought to know some. Suffice it to say that I was largely wrong about that.

Sorry, I can't tell you what I don't know. All the arguments for theism that I've ever heard were either chock-full of logical fallacies, or purely instrumental, of the form "I don't care if any of this stuff is true or not, but I'm going to pretend that it is because doing so helps me in some way". I personally believe that there's a large performance penalty associated with believing false things, and thus arguments of the second sort are entirely unconvincing for me.

I am looking forward to your discussion post, however. Hopefully, I'll finally get to see some solid arguments for theism in there !

Comment author: DSimon 14 May 2013 10:02:23PM 1 point [-]

I didn't come here expecting people to be rigid. But when I asked people what the best arguments for theism were, they either told me that there were none, or they rehashed bad ones that are refuted easily.

How does this response mean that we're rigid?