Bugmaster comments on Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable - Less Wrong

124 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2007 03:21AM

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Comment author: Bugmaster 04 October 2011 10:34:03PM 2 points [-]

...it could be alien teenagers.

+1 for that imagery alone. I'm still chuckling over that one.

Still, I think that there is a difference between ethics and all the other magisteria that the Christian religion was forced to shed: ethics is prescriptive, not descriptive. Thus, someone could claim, f.ex., "I have the right to keep slaves, my holy book says so, end of story", and you couldn't exactly dispute that (though you could stop him by force, hopefully). By contrast, if he said, "the Earth is flat, my holy book says so, end of story", all you have to do is show him some orbital photos, and you'd dispute his claim.

BTW, there are quite a few religions in the world; Christianity is not the only one. They all make all kinds of wacky claims, but some of them are quite a bit more progressive than Christianity, while others (f.ex. some flavors of Wicca and Buddhism) prescribe no moral/ethical judgements at all.