Aww, no bet then? Apology accepted.
I myself hold contradictory, irrational beliefs. I like many of them, even though part of me knows of the contradictions. I also know that if I streamlined my values to be coherent, I wouldn't be myself, and it's not a realistic endeavor anyways, psychologically. I very much doubt that my beliefs are especially contradictory, if a supposed rationalist were telling me he/she held very few contradictory beliefs/aliefs that would be mostly amusing.
My problem is taking a clearly irrational belief (and I suspect many smart theists deep down know this) and abusing all of one's wits to put lipstick on that pig. It's such a waste, and such an unnecessary self-delusion ("trying to make it seem rational", not even "believing in it"). That's what gets me going, the waste of potential.
I'm not concerned with the Christian version of the Categorical Imperative. Not with Christian ethics, there certainly are worse kinds. Not with having a group identity, so do fans of Vernor Vinge novels (just finished A Fire Upon The Deep).
Not even with the First Cause musings, although those often get more into the motivated cognition area. (I also think Krauss is trivially wrong when overstating his "nothing" in "a universe from nothing".)
My problem is with the absurd epistemic claims such as "a bodily resurrection took place", "Jesus was tortured to death so I can be saved from my original sin". In a way, it's as bad as Creationism. There isn't all that much difference between saying "the devil planted the dinosaur skeletons", and saying "eyewitness testimony of a few dozen shepherds and partly biased people thousands of years ago, in a book full of allegories and symbolisms suffices to establish that it in fact Jesus was bodily resurrected".
Sure, Creationists make many more such claims, but really, does it matter how many risen dead you believe in, as long as the number is greater than 0?
Sure, Creationists make many more such claims, but really, does it matter how many risen dead you believe in, as long as the number is greater than 0?
You know, it does. Making less mistakes = rationality.
Not much more for me to reply to here.
So, one more litany, hopefully someone else finds it as useful.
It's an understatement that humility is not a common virtue in online discussions, even, or especially when it's most needed.
I'll start with my own recent example. I thought up a clear and obvious objection to one of the assertions in Eliezer's critique of the FAI effort compared with the Pascal's Wager and started writing a witty reply. ...And then I stopped. In large part because I had just gone through the same situation, but on the other side, dealing with some of the comments to my post about time-turners and General Relativity by those who know next to nothing about General Relativity. It was irritating, yet here I was, falling into the same trap. And not for the first time, far from it. The following is the resulting thought process, distilled to one paragraph.
I have not spent 10,000+ hours thinking about this topic in a professional, all-out, do-the-impossible way. I probably have not spent even one hour seriously thinking about it. I probably do not have the prerequisites required to do so. I probably don't even know what prerequisites are required to think about this topic productively. In short, there are almost guaranteed to exist unknown unknowns which are bound to trip up a novice like me. The odds that I find a clever argument contradicting someone who works on this topic for a living, just by reading one or two popular explanations of it are minuscule. So if I think up such an argument, the odds of it being both new and correct are heavily stacked against me. It is true that they are non-zero, and there are popular examples of non-experts finding flaws in an established theory where there is a consensus among the experts. Some of them might even be true stories. No, Einstein was not one of these non-experts, and even if he were, I am not Einstein.
And so on. So I came up with the following, rather unpolished mantra:
If I think up what seems like an obvious objection, I will resist assuming that I have found a Weaksauce Weakness in the experts' logic. Instead I may ask politely whether my argument is a valid one, and if not, where the flaw lies.
If you think it useful, feel free to improve the wording.