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lisper comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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Comments (429)
Oh, right. Hmmm. Good question.
...I want to say that it's common sense that not everyone who claims to be an authority figure is one, and that preferably one authority figure should introduce another on first meeting. But... Eve may well have been only hours old, and would not have any experience to back that up with.
There are plenty of ways to handle it, yes. All of which work very well for one generation. Twenty, thirty years' time there's a new batch turning up. One either needs a recording or, better yet, get them to teach their children...
Yes, I know exactly what site this is. Yes, I know that the reasoning "he can't grow crops, therefore he killed his brother" is badly flawed. But the question is not whether people would think like that. The question is why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?
And I think that the answer to that question is, because Cain had a guilty conscience. Because he had a guilty conscience, he defaults to expecting that, if anyone else sees something that is a result of his crime, they will correctly divine the reason for what they see (Cain was very much not a rationalist).
I don't think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.
On a tribal level, yes, a cooperative tribe will outcompete a "pure evil" tribe easily. But even the "pure evil" tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations.
I'm not claiming they'd be able to survive long-term, by any means. I just think one generation is a bit short.
That is true. However, in this case, if the universe if a computer, then the computer appears to have just sat around and waited for the first 14B years doing nothing. If it's intended to find the answer to some question faster than its creator could, then it must be a pretty big question.
Yeah... wonderful climate, great biodiversity, near-total lack of large-scale natural disasters (as long as you stay off the floodplains), even our own private floral kingdom... absolutely horrible politicians.
Maybe because God has cursed him to be a "fugitive and a vagabond." People didn't like fugitives and vagabonds back then (they still don't ).
Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, "Wow, Cain, you're right, people are going to try to kill you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I'd better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you." (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)
How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn't last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.
This universe is not (as far as we can tell) intended to do anything. That doesn't make your argument any less bogus.
I read it as more along the lines of "No, nobody's going to kill you. Here, let me give you a magic feather just to calm you down."
...fair enough. Doesn't mean they weren't doing a lot of evil, though, even if they were occasionally cooperating.
You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:
"Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him."
I don't know how God could possibly have made it any clearer that He thought someone killing Cain was a real possibility. (I also can't help but wonder how you take sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)
You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:
You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God's Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, "Whoa, that doesn't seem right to me." At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions. (Before you choose you should read Jeremiah 19:9.)
That wasn't a thought process. That was spoken words; the intent behind those words was not given. What we're given here is an if-then - if anyone slays Cain, then that person will have vengeance taken upon him. It does not say whether or not the "if" is at all likely to happen, and may have been intended merely to calm Cain's irrational fear of the "if" part happening.
I think it's "kill them and six members of their clan/family", but I'm not sure.
Yes, and then we discussed the viability of continually doing evil, as it pertains to survival for more than one generation. You were sufficiently persuasive on the matter of cooperation for survival that I then weakened my stance from "continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren't even considering doing non-evil stuff" to "doing a whole lot of evil stuff a lot of the time".
In fact, looking at Genesis 6:5:
...it mentions two things. It mentions how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time. This is two separate things; the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds (with continuously evil thoughts only mentioned after the "and").
But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing. My parents were Christian, and raised me in a Christian environment; I might therefore expect that my moral intuition is closer to God's Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture.
And, looking at human history, there most certainly have been cultures that regularly did things that I would find morally objectionable. In fact, there are still such cultures in existence today. Human cultures have, in the past, gone to such horrors as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and so on - things which my moral intuitions say are badly wrong, but which (presumably) someone raised in such a culture would have much less of a problem with.
"The LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him". Again, I don't see how God could have possibly made it any clearer that the intent of putting the mark on Cain was to prevent the otherwise very real possibility of people killing him.
If you're not sure, then you must believe that there could be circumstances under which killing six members of a person's family as punishment for a crime they did not commit could be justified. I find that deeply disturbing.
No, it simply refers to an evil state of being. It says nothing about what brought about that state. But it doesn't matter. The fact that it specifically calls out thoughts means that the Flood was at least partially retribution for thought crimes.
Sure, and so are everyone else's.
A Muslim would disagree with you. Have you considered the possibility that they might be right and you are wrong? It's just the luck of the draw that you happened to be born into a Christian household rather than a Muslim one. Maybe you got unlucky. How would you tell?
But you keep dancing around the real question: Do you really believe that killing innocent bystanders can be morally justified? Or that genocide as a response to thought crimes can be morally justified? Or that forcing people to cannibalize their own children (Jeremiah 19:9) can be morally justified? Because that is the price of taking the Bible as your moral standard.
Looking at another translation:
(footnote: "Many commentators believe this sign not to have been like a brand on the forehead, but something awesome about Cain’s appearance that made people dread and avoid him. In the Talmud, the rabbis suggested several possibilities, including leprosy, boils, or a horn that grew out of Cain. But it was also suggested that Cain was given a pet dog to serve as a protective sign.")
Looking over the list, most of them do say something along the lines of "so that no one would kill him", but there are a scattering of others. I interpret is as saying that the sign given to Cain was a clear warning - something easily understood as "DO NOT KILL THIS MAN" - but I don't see any sign that it was ever actually necessary to save Cain's life.
There is a fallacy at work here. Consider a statement of the form, "if A then B". Consider the situation where A is a thing that is never true; for example 1=2. Then the statement becomes "if 1=2 then B". Now, at this point, I can substitute in anything I want for B, and the statement remains morally neutral; since one can never be equal to two.
Now, the statement given here was as follows: "If someone kills Cain, then that person will have vengeance laid against them sevenfold". Consider, then, that perhaps no-one killed Cain. Perhaps he died of pneumonia, or was attacked by a bear, or fell off a cliff, or drowned.
I don't see how it's possible to be in an evil state of being without at least seriously attempting to do evil deeds.
I see I phrased my point poorly. Let me fix that. My moral intuition is closer to what is in the Bible than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture. While the theoretical Muslim and I may have some disagreements as to what extent the Bible is God's Word, I think we can agree on this rephrased point.
I have considered the possibility. My conclusion is that it would take pretty convincing evidence to persuade me of that, but it is not impossible that I am wrong.
Are you familiar with the trolley problem? In short, it raises the question of whether or not it is a morally justifiable action to kill one innocent bystander in order to save five innocent bystanders.
Ordinary English doesn't work like that. "If X, then Y will happen" includes possible worlds in which X is true.
"If you fall into the sun, you will die" expresses a meaningful idea even if nobody falls into the sun.
Exactly. "Did not" is not the same as "can not." Particularly since God's threats are intended to have a deterrent effect. The whole point (I presume) is to try to influence things so that evil acts don't happen even though they can.
But we don't even need to look to God's forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.
I think a lot of Christians would say that the eternal torment isn't for the crime of not believing in Jesus but for other crimes; what believing in Jesus would do is enable one to escape the sentence for those other crimes.
And a lot of Christians, mostly different ones, would say that the threat of eternal torment was a mistake that we've now outgrown, or was never intended to be taken literally, or is a misunderstanding of a threat of final destruction, or something of the kind.
I wasn't speaking about "did not". I was speaking about "will not", which is distinct from "can not" and is a form that can only be employed by a speaker with sufficient certainty about the future - unknown to me, but not to an omniscient being.
According to official Catholic doctrine:
In other words, trying to do the right thing counts.
CCC may be claiming that the Bible (in this translation?) does not accurately represent God's motive here. But that just calls attention to the fact that - for reasons which escape me even after trying to read the comment tree - you're both talking about a story that seems ridiculous on every level. Your last paragraph indeed seems like a more fruitful line of discussion.