Jiro comments on Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: elharo 03 October 2015 01:23PM

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Comment author: gjm 13 November 2015 08:59:41AM 4 points [-]

now we're just arguing about the price

For me, part of the humour in that story is that the person who says that is wrong -- there really is an important difference (even if only a difference of degree rather than kind) between willingness to have sex with a stranger for $1M and willingness to do it for $100.

Anyway: I'm now not quite sure what argument you're making here. I originally thought it was something like "Although C S Lewis opposed X on the grounds that it's tyrannical, he himself would have been tyrannical given the chance, so he's being hypocritical". But tyranny, like prostitution, comes in degrees. Almost everyone has some things they would prefer to be illegal, so "If C S Lewis were convinced that divorce does a lot of harm and stopping it has few bad side effects, he would support laws against divorce" gives basically zero support to the idea that Lewis was or would have been any more of a tyrant than, say, 95% of the population. Could you clarify what your point is and why you're making it?

Comment author: Jiro comment score below threshold [+] (22 children)

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 17 November 2015 01:13:27AM 4 points [-]

Do you honestly think that many people would believe that killing a zygote is murder without the influence of religion?

Would anyone believe that killing a newly born baby is murder without the influence of religion?

Comment author: polymathwannabe comment score below threshold [+] (10 children)

Comment author: g_pepper 18 November 2015 02:46:24PM * 1 point [-]

I think the point that VoiceOfRa is making is that, just as a non-religious person might reasonably think that killing a newly born baby is murder, so might a non-religious person reasonably think that killing a zygote is murder. If so, then whether religion has or has not contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion is irrelevant to VoiceOfRa's point. (VoiceOfRa, please correct me if I misunderstand your point.)

Also, it is not clear to me what you mean by "religion has contributed to more infanticide than lack of religion". If you mean that religion has contributed to more infanticides than have all causes of a non-religious nature, then that seems unlikely to be true (and hard to verify one way or the other). What is your basis for this statement?

Comment author: entirelyuseless 18 November 2015 02:52:00PM 2 points [-]

I suspect the polymathwannabe is referring to the ancient custom of war where after defeating your enemy, you go around and kill all their babies and their males, and take their women. Of course, that has nothing to do with religion one way or the other.

Regarding ordinary infanticide, that was also an ancient custom, approved e.g. by Aristotle. The practice had nothing to do with religion but had practical motivations. Areas that converted to Christianity put a stop to it.

Comment author: signal 18 November 2015 07:16:04PM 0 points [-]

Jane Goodall has some interesting oberservations regarding infanticide among chimpanzees in her book "Through a Window." While chimpanzees will attack females that are strangers to a group violently, their infants will only, and in rare instances, die as casualties, but not be directly attacked. Infanticide within a community has only been observed in a few cases and all perpetrated by the same female individual and her daughter. However, she concluded from their behavior that their reason lay solely in the meat of the hunted infants.

Comment author: polymathwannabe comment score below threshold [+] (6 children)

Comment author: ChristianKl 18 November 2015 06:30:49PM 2 points [-]

But cultures with relatively low population counts compared to centuries of populous Christian countries.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 19 November 2015 04:26:29AM 1 point [-]

Dozens? I only know of one, the pre-Jewish Semites.

Comment author: polymathwannabe 19 November 2015 04:32:49AM 0 points [-]

Assorted examples from other cultures.

Comment author: g_pepper 19 November 2015 06:04:39AM * 5 points [-]

You seem to be arguing against a position that, as far as I know, no one on LW actually believes or defends. You are doing this by generalizing about religiosity from examples of marginal and/or long since vanished religions, and all the while you are ignoring entirelyuseless's probably correct observation that most infanticide historically has been due to reasons (warfare and practical considerations) that have nothing to do with religiosity.

I am not sure where you are going with all of this.

Comment author: Lumifer 18 November 2015 05:52:06PM 1 point [-]

Given ritual adult sacrifice, practiced across dozens of cultures, what does this prove?

Comment author: polymathwannabe comment score below threshold [+] (0 children)

Comment author: entirelyuseless 13 November 2015 05:19:02PM 2 points [-]

I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. That is not now the case about the seven day literal creation, but it was either the case in the past, or the account in the book of Genesis was not believed by the author, or not intended literally, since it was written one way or the other.

But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult and might not have adopted it if it had contained arbitary content such as "eating mushrooms is a grave sin that will be punished by a worse hell than anything else." So even if we falsely assume that the content of all religions is completely arbitrary in itself, the content of his religion would not be, since he chose it.

Comment author: Jiro 13 November 2015 05:39:23PM * 0 points [-]

I think many people would believe that abortion is murder without being religious.

That link shows that one person would believe that abortion is murder without being religious. A poll shows 84% of atheists and agnostics in favor of legal abortion, with 14% against, and even that 14% is not specifically about zygotes, it's about abortion as a whole.

But in any case, again, Lewis adopted his religion as an adult

His family was Anglican and he became an Anglican. That suggests that he adopted the religion mostly because of the influence of his background.

Comment author: entirelyuseless 13 November 2015 05:55:59PM 0 points [-]

14% of atheists and agnostics is a large number of people in absolute terms, and I suspect that a good number of those people would believe the same thing about zygotes for the sake of consistency. In any case it is not even close to saying that it is something that nobody would ever believe without religion.

It could be true that he became Anglican mainly because his family was Anglican, without it being true that he would have done so if the content of that religion had contained completely arbitrary claims such as the one I mentioned. I invented that arbitrary claim for a reason, namely to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims. There is a reason that Lewis's religion did not contain that claim, and a reason why it did contain the claim that murder is wrong. The content is not arbitrary.

Comment author: gjm 13 November 2015 06:10:49PM 0 points [-]

I largely agree with what you're saying here, but:

I invented that arbitrary claim [...] to show that actually arbitrary claims look very different from religious claims.

I'm afraid I don't think you did a terribly good job of showing that. Plenty of actual religious claims are really not so different from your example. E.g., if it's ridiculous to single out eating mushrooms, what about eating shellfish? If it's ridiculous to suggest that eating the wrong foods is a particularly serious kind of sin, what about saying the same about sexual misconduct?

(My examples are from the Judaeo-Christian tradition because that's what I know best, but I'm pretty sure I could find similarly close parallels from almost any religion.)

Comment author: entirelyuseless 13 November 2015 06:27:07PM 0 points [-]

They didn't say that eating shellfish is worse than murder, while if the claims were completely arbitrary, there is no reason why they wouldn't say that, and no reason for them not to say that murder is good.

I agree that many, maybe even all, religions contain some things that seem somewhat arbitrary (like the shellfish), but they are not completely arbitrary (thus not worse than murder.) I would also suspect that those food regulations in their original context were less arbitrary than we suppose, and became more arbitrary as the situation changed, which led to most people abandoning those specific things.

This is certainly true about sexual misconduct: at least in the past, promiscuity was dangerous physically and in other ways, and condemning it was certainly not arbitrary.

Comment author: gjm 13 November 2015 09:38:21PM 0 points [-]

They didn't say that eating shellfish is worse than murder

No indeed. I was careful not to claim that they do. But if there are widely held religions that (1) condemn the eating of specific foodstuffs and (2) single out one not-obviously-specially-bad class of prohibited activity on obviously spurious grounds, then I don't think you can really claim that combining those two features makes something so obviously silly that it's unlike the perfectly sensible prohibitions that real religions have.

I agree that it's not hard to imagine reasons why prohibiting shellfish and pork might have been quite a good idea. But you could say the exact same thing about mushrooms, no?

Comment author: entirelyuseless 13 November 2015 10:18:50PM * 0 points [-]

Ok, so in principle a religion might both prohibit mushrooms and even say that it is especially bad, even though I doubt there are many things like this in the real world. But it is very possible that Lewis would not have adopted such a religion precisely because he would not have considered it very sensible. I note that he did not even adopt one that prohibits things like shellfish even without saying that it is especially evil.

Also, I was not saying that such things are perfectly sensible, but that they are not perfectly arbitrary, which is what was being asserted, even if not by you.

Comment author: gjm 13 November 2015 10:25:34PM -1 points [-]

I'm really not convinced that he would have found "religion X has arbitrary-looking prohibitions in it" good evidence for "religion X is wrong". In one of his books he fairly explicitly argues for such prohibitions on the grounds that they provide an opportunity to obey God simply because one ought to obey God rather than because one sees the rightness of what he's commanded. (One bit of my brain is telling me it's in Perelandra, in which case presumably the idea is put into the mouth of his Eve-figure there whose name I've forgotten. Another is suggesting it's with more direct reference to the Eden narrative in Genesis. Probably at most one is right.)

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Jiro comments on Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015 - Less Wrong

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