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Raw_Power comments on The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy - Less Wrong
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Here is my ranking of religious people, in lessening order of how irritating I find them:
Fundies that don't try to make sense, have an inconsisten set of beliefs, which ends up boilng down to societal rules that are abhorrent to the Liberal Social Democrat Humanist. They will behead you if you meet a certain number of more-or-less reasonable criteria. They will not feel sorry about it.
Moderates that don't try to make sense, , have an inconsisten set of beliefs, which ends up boilng down to societal rules that are pleasant to the Liberal Social Democrat Humanist. They will not behead you, ever. They might feel guilty about not doing it.
Fundies that do try to make sense, have a mostly consistent and sensible set of beliefs, which is based on the literal revealed text, understood as well as possible, using the original language, with all the modern tools of hermeneutics and linguistics, who don't care about any sensibilieties, modern or traditional, only about those of their chosen Prophet(s). They will behead you if you meet a certain number of clearly established, sensible, consistent criteria that are applied at all times to everyone. They may or may not feel sorry about it, and they may or may not try to apply as much clemency as the rules allow them.
Yup. The last ones, I can tolerate best. It takes a lot of courage, and a lot of fortitude, as well as other "virtues", to be a true, honest follower of your own religion. It requires a lot of selflessness, and a lot of sacrifice. I had been trying to be one ever since I was a child. And all I found around me were people in the first and second category. There were exceptional, modern Muslim reformists like that Tarik Ramadan (of whom I still think eh is a pretty cool guy, as fundies go), who tried to give Muslims who had a mind towards modernity and competitiveness and consistency and justice an acceptable workframe to do that within Islam. But then I stumbled upon this place and found out that the thing I was striving for, consistency, is unattainable in religion.
In other words, all those people are wasting their time.
You could say I took a sort-of scenic route to rationality, by wanting to be a real Muslim, one that did everything the Qran and Muhammad would want him to do (including figuring out what exactly they'd want me to do), consistently and coherently. Islam makes it more difficult to do than Christianity and Judaism because it is almost bare, pure Theism, and until I read Relgion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable, I thought the system was still salvageable. Well, so much for all that time wasted to angst. (Now instead I waste time ranting...)
Formatting note: You're missing a space between the asterisk at the beginning of a paragraph, and the letter following it.
Frankly, I expected to be downvoted to hell for this... Why did the opposite happen I wonder?
Hypothesis: People agree.
Alternate hypothesis (of which I am a single data point): People think it was a well-written, interesting comment, despite disagreeing with its conclusion on several points.
Either way, Ureshi!
I take it Bart Ehrman followed a similar path...learning Greek in order to learn New Testament "scripture"...only to find out that nobody knows for sure what the "original" really was.
This is a common problem for all the Abrahamic scripture-based religions, whether they admit it or not (they mostly don't.) It's really, really hard -- I would say impossible -- to prove that variations or changes have not been introduced since the time of a hypothetical original text, copied from handwriting scribe to handwriting scribe. And the harder, fundamentalist versions of the Abrahamic religions always ascribe HUGE importance to the integrity and wonderfulness of the text.
This is why some fundies interpret their scripture to say that God will magically make it such that whatever text they happen to have on hand is the right text! Example.
Logically, this is as circular as the people who interpret their scripture to say that the scripture is inerrant, but of course it's good enough for them.
And rocks. Don't forget the bit with the rocks.
It might be hard or even borderline impossible, but I do respect people who honestly try. I know for instance, that Jehovah's Witnesses did a lot of work in cross-corelating as many different copies of the scriptures as they could get their hands on to weed out mistranslations, copy errors, etc. when developing their own translation. So for whatever it's worth, it's nice that some people at least try.
Agreed that consistency is very important. However, I think that your #3ers, even though they correctly push their system very hard, are actually behaving in a very irrational way.
Being willing to let inconsistencies slide (as the #1ers and #2ers do) violates the important rationalist rule of noticing when you are (or ought to be) confused. However, it's a much less dangerous response than chasing down confusion but refusing to let the results adjust your moment-to-moment world model! In other words, #3ers are only doing the first half of a scientific or mathematical process, which eliminates most of the benefit, but still is enough to give them a false sense of confidence in their own assertions.
The "fuzzy" thinkers, #1 and #2, are just sitting back and letting society guide them along the path of least resistance, often acknowledging (particularly in the case of #2ers) that they have only minimal confidence in their own knowledge. That's not particularly rational, but it at least isn't actively pushing things in a bad direction.
I guess to put it another way: not all changes make things worse, but anything that makes things worse must be a change. The volume of choice-space that makes the world a crappier place is much smaller than the volume that makes things better. Because of that, overconfidence can be much worse than underconfidence, though both are bad.