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Dagon comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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1) (snarky response) I'm not sure why their lack of imagination should influence my beliefs. 2) (real response) the value of "God" matters a whole lot in this discussion. The bait and switch I worry about is that any personal experience gets used to justify extremely unlikely belief clusters. I don't think someone's hallucinations justifies my rejection of Occam's Razor.
I think this is a stretched analogy, but even if I accepted it, nobody who enjoys music is telling me to accept a bunch of other supernatural bullshit.
I'm not suggesting it should influence your beliefs about the world. I'm suggesting it should influence your beliefs about them.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. By choosing to call it "supernatural bullshit" rather than "a not altogether unreasonable (though nonetheless mistaken) attempt to account for real subjective experiences that they have had and I have not (and in the absence of education and information that I possess that they might not)" you miss a very important truth: you are dealing with a fellow human being who might be making an honest attempt to make sense of the world in the face of subjective experiences and other background that may be very different from your own. By choosing to label their beliefs "supernatural bullshit" you might be shutting down possible avenues of communication and the opportunity to make the world a better place, even if it is supernatural bullshit.
I debated with myself about whether to use the inflammatory or reconciliatory framing. It really can go either way, depending on what other parts of the spiritual/supernatural belief cluster is being dragged along with the personal experiences, and what the spriritualist is asking me to accept beyond just "some difficult-to-describe experiences have occurred".