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Stabilizer comments on Rationality Quotes August 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (233)
You nailed it.
This is the kind of bullshit logic many religions adopt to get from A to B; where A is something innocuous sounding and B is something that sounds profound. It works because thinking is contaminative. In the above example, there was a simple conflation of the concepts behind the words "spiritual system" and "spiritual." Most people won't pick up on that because the two words sound very similar.
Thus, in getting from A to B via a sequence, C,D,E..., all you have to do is slightly change the meanings of the words (or use similar sounding words) in each step of the argument. By the time you reach B, you can could've proved whatever you wanted.
I dunno, thinking about it in terms of "spiritual system" applying in general, and "spiritual" applying to a specific case does not seem like a conflation, in the same way that "set" and "element of set" are distinct.
In this case this certainly is true:
generalises to:
Of course, this might sound more profound when you've been drinking.
Not all things referred to in a spiritual system need be spiritual. For example, a spiritual system could say that drinking is not spiritual -- which is what Islam explicitly says. Indeed, associating the tag "spiritual" or "not spiritual" to different activities is one of the main goals of religions.