Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
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I'm not so sure. Some of the anti-religious stuff is specifically concerned with Eliezer's upbringing, and so far as I know he wasn't brought up to believe aliens are visiting earth. Some of it is concerned with the fact that religious belief is widespread among (otherwise) reasonable people, which isn't so true of UFO theories. I would guess that most of what could be replaced with material about UFOs could about equally well just be removed; it's the rest that's difficult.
You're probably right about the personal material, although I suspect you could make the theoretical points in another way. But it wouldn't be a matter of easily substituting one thing for another.
One could make the points about religious beliefs relative to rationality without directly asserting that all religious beliefs are false, simply because it is obvious for simple logical reasons that the majority of such beliefs are false (because opposed religious beliefs cannot both be true), and even religious people will grant that this is the case. And the m... (read more)