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Lumifer comments on Rational Evangelism - Less Wrong
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A master was once unmoved by the complaints of his disciples that, though they listened with pleasure to his parables and stories, they were also frustrated for they longed for something deeper. To all their objections he would simply reply: "You have yet to understand, my friends, that the shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story."
You need a good story. That's all. A good story.
2 things come to my mind as examples:
The first one is about the past and comes from a novel called "Quo Vadis" which is about early christianity. There is a scene there where a roman guy searching a girl he wanted stumbles on a christians meeting and there was Peter retelling the story of Jesus. The power of his words as a living witness made the guy forget what he was looking for. Personal testimony is one huge attention grabber if is done right.
The second one is from Dune. Pardot Kynes, the planetologist, tells to the fremen the story of Arrakis could become and tells it so well that Uliet, the guy in charge of killing him chose to take his own life and with this self-sacrifice started the terraforming process.
So, what would a rational story be about? Health and Happiness sound like good bets. It should incorporate elements described by religious mysticism, stuff like Love, Joy, Strength, Peace, Trust, etc. It should position itself to the current effort to find common ground... like the Charter for Compassion. It should be about a long journey of discovering the power of love.
"What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but expressing them. And so we cannot avoid this conclusion: it is biologically evident that to gain control of passion and so make it serve spirit must be a condition of progress. Sooner or later, then, the world will brush aside our incredulity and take this step : because whatever is the more true comes out into the open, and whatever is better is ultimately realized. The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Notably, both are fiction.
<rolls eyes> And what exactly would make that story "rational"? Pray to St.Bayes to discover the power of love? X-0
I think a fidelity to the truth will make the story rational. I would love a story without slips into magikal thinking.
What do you call "the truth" in the context of a fictional story?
The truth I was referring in the previous comment is Scientific understanding.
Also, when I said story I did not meant a work of fiction but more like an work of vision.
Something like a reimagining of what life could be for the human race and the commitment to implement that vision as expressed by the people telling the story and living the story.
I don't understand what these words mean to you.
I still don't understand. What does "fidelity to the truth" mean in the context of ideology? Science doesn't tell you what your values should be.
I find I can always count on you to make pointlessly snarky comments.
I would prefer to be more specific, and say 'understanding, acceptance, confidence, control, and love' (with clear definitions for each, probably similar to the ones in the GROW Blue Book). Not all of these things can be used to make clever, snappy remarks to wow outsiders, but they are all necessary for a satisfying life, and therefore must be addressed effectively by any sound philosophy of life. The parent comment was only vague, not wrong.
One of the services I provide :-P
I don't see how understanding, acceptance, and love follow from rationality. Confidence and control are more reasonable.
Are you saying that rationalism is a "philosophy of life", even leaving the soundness aside for a minute?
The parent comment said: "You need a good story. That's all. A good story."
That's not vague. That's wrong.
They do not follow from it, they are necessary to it.
No. But a story that is trying to have broad appeal needs these things, whether it's a story about rationality or about watching paint dry. A story conveys a sense of life.
That depends on what you think 'good' is supposed to imply there. If 'convincing' is the intended connotation, then yeah, wrong. If 'consistent' is the intended connotation, that is not obviously wrong, People need stories to help them get stuff done, even though stories are overall pretty terrible.
Science, for example, has methods, but overall science is a story about how to get accurate data and interpret it accurately in spite of our human failings. The way that the elements of that story were obtained does not make it any less of a story. History itself is a story, no matter how accurate you get, it remains a narrative rather than a fact. Reality exists, but all descriptions of it are stories; there are no facts found in stories; Facts are made of reality, not of words.