= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Bart119 comments on The ethics of breaking belief - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (125)
I think you (and most commenters) are treating this hypothetical believer in a rather disrespectful and patronizing fashion. I would think the ethical thing to do is to engage in a meta-discussion with such a person and see whether there are certain subjects that are off limits, how they feel about your differing views on God, how they would feel about losing their faith, etc. They might ask you similar questions about what might make you become a believer. You might find yourself incorrect about what might make them lose their belief.
It's certainly possible to remain in a religious community without one's faith intact -- I think it happens to a large percentage of people in any religious group. Consider all the European Catholics who are essentially atheists.
What does "essentially" mean here? Out of all European Catholics I know none I would call an essential atheist. On the other hand, I know at least one essentially atheistic European Protestant.
58% of French people consider themselves Catholic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_France
34% of French people assent to: "I believe there is a God". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Europe
Of course, there are methodological issues and this doesn't prove the matter definitively, but it certain suggests that a lot of French people are "cultural Catholics" the way we have "cultural Jews" in the US.
Well, originally you have written "all European Catholics". I don't dispute the existence of cultural Catholics.
I think that "Consider all the European Catholics who are essentially atheists" should be read as "Consider all the {European Catholics who are essentially atheists}", not "Consider {all the European Catholics}, (who are essentially atheists)".
Like CuSithBell, I'll plead the restrictive relative clause interpretation, bolstered by the absence of a comma. I'll also plead common sense as an ambiguity resolution tool. And not only do we have the existence of cultural Catholics, we've got as our first estimate a minimum (if every God-believing French person were a Catholic) of 41% of Catholics who don't subscribe to a vital church teaching.
I apologise for misinterpretation, then. The intended reading didn't occur to me.
In fact I have attempted such meta-discussion. Unfortunately it's very difficult to get a straight answer to questions like that; people will almost always CLAIM to care about the truth, but that's also what they would claim if they merely thought they cared and didn't reflect enough on it to know otherwise.
The possibility that I am incorrect about what would make them lose their belief is a very real one; I used to think that merely repeating the things that broke MY faith in God would work on everyone, and that was clearly wrong. Still, I'd give p>.33 for success, and thus expect it to work on at least one of the three people I'm writing about.
The following point is of interest primarily to the OP and is orthogonal to the OP's question.
You should maybe spend some time looking at the foundation of your rationality, as this statement rings some alarm bells.
Probability estimates should be numbers, not ranges, unless you're doing something nonstandard. I can understand saying something like "I don't want to commit to saying anything about the probability of event A beyond 0.25 < P(A) < 0.3 because I don't trust my brain's probability-assigning hardware/software". But your range is really wide, and includes probability 1! I don't think you believe that you are certain that you can convert people, so it looks like you are not clearly reporting your probability judgment.
I'm addressing this in your comment, which I've ignored in a lot of other comments, because it looks like you're doing this towards a self-serving end. The conclusion you're reaching for is that you'll convert someone, so you claim a lower bound for your probability estimate that let's you assert this. (Incidentally, a conversion probability of 33% gives you a (1 - 0.33)^3 = 30% probability of converting none of the three people.)
I venture to guess that it is nearly impossible for a devout person to even imagine how they would feel if they no longer needed God to guide them in everything, so there is only so much you can achieve from this meta-discussion. It is probably worse than learning that you live in the matrix. I mean, they think they can imagine it, but the actual experience once it happens will be nothing like what they would have imagined before deconversion.
I think atheists sometimes have a one-dimensional extreme view of believers. I never was a believer really (though I tried to be a Quaker for a while). I am a Unitarian-Universalist for social reasons (one joking definition of UUs is "atheists with children" -- and I'd encourage atheists to consider if it might meet their needs).
Believers know very well that there have been no unambiguous miracles lately, that really horrible things happen in the world despite a presumably benevolent God, and that the evidence for God is indirect. I think very few lie on their deathbeds with unalloyed peace and calm with the absolute conviction that they're going to heaven.
They are also well aware that different factions even within Christianity reach different conclusions about what God wants them to do.
There's a reason that religious communities are always dealing with doubters and speak of the need for having faith (despite a dearth of evidence), and understand that faith gets weaker and stronger. I think most have thought about losing their faith and what it would mean.
I don't have any statistics to quote, but I bet the majority of believers have views that are nuanced at least to this degree.