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skeptical_lurker comments on Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well, at the very least I'd say its encouraging them to visit France.
Admittedly, yes for some reason I took this article at face value, rather then assuming that everyone lies about everything all the time, which is generally a good assumption.
If there are non-Christian pupils in the school, the obvious next step is to demand that their religious holidays are observed too.
Its the tactic of taking it one step at a time. Demand that the school recognise other religions exist, then demand that they teach that the other religions are not evil, then that they are equally valid. Since a fundamental point of Christianity is that other religions are wrong (thou shall have no other god) or "put here by Satan to tempt us" (according the people from the Christian union at a perfectly normal university), then if they accede to the next demand then many people would say they are then Christian in name only.
Demand that they acknowledge that some kids are not Christian. Then acknowledge that they are from other faiths. Then exempt them from religious services. Then allow them to hold their own religious services away from the other kids. Then get the school as a whole to celebrate other religion's festivals. Then try to stop people wishing each other a merry Christmas and instead say "Happy Holidays".
I'm not trying to take the Christians' side - I think their religion is absurd. I'm trying to show that they are right to be afraid of the tactic where each step seems reasonable and tolerant, and then several steps down the line everything they value is gone.
Some people do do this. Heard of Elevatorgate? A guy asked a girl if she fancied a cup of coffee. She realised that 'coffee' might be a euphemism for sex, and that rapists also want sex, and so asking her if she wants coffee was "a potential sexual assault". The absurdity would be funny if it hadn't torn the atheist & skeptics movement in half.
Thing is, now the transphobes can launch a witch-hunt to see which kid to bully. A secret like this would probably only be told to a close friend, which narrows that pool. Even if the kid has a few close friends, you can bet its the one who has been acting weird and has interests more typical of the opposite sex.
Maybe you could try to enforce a lack of politics?
I really don't think we should be condemning people for doing something that could be followed by doing something else that could be followed by doing something else that would be bad. Not unless we have actual evidence that they intend the whole sequence.
(I also remark that what you originally said was that schools are encouraging children to be gay and transsexual. We've come quite a way from there.)
Maybe they are. But being afraid of something doesn't, at least in my value system nor in theirs if they haven't that bit about not bewaring false witness against other people, constitute sufficient reason to claim it's already happened.
Yes, I have heard of it and I know enough about the story to know that your version of it is quite inaccurate. But that's not the point here. The point is that that kind of overreaction is silly and harmful, and it's what the school did in this case, and to my mind that means we should be cautious about trusting their account of what the inspectors did.
Yes, that's a problem. For the avoidance of doubt, it's not my purpose to claim that the inspectors didn't do anything foolish or harmful. I am claiming only that your original characterization of the situation is wrong. Which I think you're not disputing at this point.
I'm not condemning it, at most I'm saying the school's head teacher is right to condemn it from within his value system. I'm slightly torn here between saying I understand why people might draw a line in the sand to avoid being defeated one step at a time, and realising that this would make organisations really inflexible.
Do you have a relatively short, unbiased version of elevatorgate you can link me to?
But yes, I take your point, and given that the school is biased they can't be trusted here.
Broadly speaking, yes. I mean, teaching children how lesbians have sex might have happened, and if it did then it might slightly increase the number of lesbians, but that's not nesscerly the intention. At the very least, I massively overstated the case.
ahahahahahaha hahaha hahahaaaa.
(On the substantive issues, I think we're basically done at this point.)
Agreed on both points.
So is this the situation where everything the Christians value is gone..?
All that (except maybe for the last sentence) sounds perfectly reasonable to me. In fact, acknowledging that some kids are not Christian -- if, in fact, they are not -- seems to me like the first step away from insanity.
Well, their parents did choose to send them to a Christian school.
...yes, and?
Presumably that means they want their kids exposed to Christian values and Christian services.
And they are exposed. But if the kids are actually not Christian, recognizing that seems to me an entirely reasonable thing to do. And by the time kids want to hold their own religious services (presumably "kids" are teenagers at this point), the wishes of parents matter less.
By the standards of Christians living a few hundred years ago (and hardliners living today), the secularisation of Europe must look catastrophic. Hundreds of millions of people doomed to burn in eternal hellfire.
This is probably because you are not a hardline conservative Christian. To them, the idea that there is an alternative to Christianity is an information hazard far worse then, say, Roko's Basilisk. The idea that you would present impressionable young children with an idea which, if adopted, results in them burning in hell is pure insanity in their eyes.
Before I read the sequences and understood about 'beliefs as attire' and so forth, I was confused as to how any Abraham religion could possibly co-exist with any other religion.
Um, you do know that there are major versions of every one of the three major Abrahamic religions that don't believe in eternal suffering for non-believers? Similar remarks apply for the minor Abrahamic offshoots (although deciding which are their own offshoots is fuzzy). Moreover, there are also variations in at least one of those religions where there's enough pre-destination that most of this is rendered completely irrelevant.
I'm certainly aware that there are many variants of these religions which believe wildly different things, but it was still my understanding that "eternal suffering for non-believers" was they most mainstream branch.
"Eternal suffering for non-believers" is non-mainstream in Islam. The mainstream position is that righteous Jews, Christians and Sabaeans will be OK. Pagans, however, are right out.
Uhm, this seems like saying that "eternal suffering for non-believers" is the mainstream position... it's just that People of the Book are not automatically included among the "non-believers".
That's one way of looking at it, I suppose. I think "non-believers" normally means "people who don't believe in that religion." Remember the original question was - how can an Abrahamic religion co-exist with a different religion? These are clearly different religions. I do think I'm drawing a meaningful distinction in that Christians believe that the only way to heaven is through Jesus (John 14:6, perhaps the most famous verse in the NT) whereas Islam teaches that you don't have to be a Muslim to go to heaven.
Really? So... out of the Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, the only one which teaches that non-believers burn in hell is the one based on Jesus' teachings of forgiveness.
Why am I not that surprised.
It's a bit more complicated.
In Judaism there is basically no afterlife -- neither heaven nor hell.
Christianity introduced the promise of eternal life but made it a carrot-and-stick deal -- bask in joy or burn in flames.
Islam essentially went with Christianity's approach, but wrote in a grandfathering clause for "people of the Book" -- Jews and Christians -- who are seen as following more or less the right religion, just not the latest most-correct version updated by the final prophet (Muhammad). Pagans and atheists still burn.
My understanding is that mainstream Christians think non-Christians can go to heaven as long as they didn't have the chance to become Christian - e.g. Moses, or some undiscovered Amazonian tribe - as long as they lived righteously. The mainstream Islamic position, however, is that Islam is really obvious, so even if you never heard of the prophet Mohammed you should still be able to work out most of the stuff based on reason alone (!) so you've got no excuse. So while Christians view Moses, Abraham, etc as precursors to Christianity, Islam views them as actually having been Muslim. For Muslims, the first Muslim was Adam (of Adam and Eve fame).
So it's not that Jews, Christians and Sabaeans get grandfathered in for having the updated version. Rather, it's that they are still worshipping the right God, even though they've distorted his teachings and those of his prophets, which is surely pushing their luck. The "People of the Book" thing is way less tolerant than it sounds.
Well, Dante put the righteous pagans in Limbo (the 1st circle of hell). As for Isrealites, they got to heaven because they were followers of G-d after all.
That would be really weird given that so far as I can tell Muslims don't hold (e.g.) that all the prophets (Moses, Jesus, etc.) were aware of anything like the whole of Islam despite being actually on a mission from God. Does "most of the stuff" here mean something like "what Islam, Judaism and Christianity have in common"?
That's not really accurate. There are versions of Judaism which have no afterlife, but many classical forms of Judaism do have an afterlife. Part of the idea that Judaism doesn't have an afterlife is due to Christian misunderstandings because in Judaism the afterlife is just really, really not important. It is a much more this world focused religion. But most forms of Orthodox Judaism definitely believe in an afterlife where while the details may be fuzzy, there's a definite reward for the righteous and punishment for sin.
Can you provide some links? There is Sheol, sure, but I was under the impression that it's just a grey place where shades slowly wither away to nothing. But punishment for sinners and rewards for the righteous -- which branches believe in them? And is it a late Christian influence?
Certainly not for Judaism, even stringent forms of Orthodox Judaism. And not for the Bahai either. For the others the situation is more complicated.
Ok, well I know more about Christianity than Judaism and I assumed it was similar, but thanks for enlightening me.
I am not sure what is the point that you are making. There is a pretty diverse set of people commonly called extremists who think that the contemporary society is a catastrophe and is horribly bad. If such people decide to withdraw from the society, sure, no problems. If they decide to change, that is, "save" the society, they shouldn't be surprised to encounter resistance.
What is it that you are complaining about?
I'm not complaining. I think secularisation is a good thing. If anything, I'm trying to convey just how much values have changed, and I'm a little concerned about how they might change in the future, either by moving back to past religious values or by moving forward in some bizarre direction.
You know the ideological turing test and the idea that you should only be able to argue against a position if you truly understand their point of view? Well, I think I can see these sort of issues from both an extreme libertarian and an extreme social conservative viewpoint and the contradiction is doing strange things to my brain.
Also, I'm defending a statement Azeroth123 made (schools are encouraging kids to be gay - although I'm not so sure about this now) while not endorsing his conclusions, which also might make what I have written seem confusing or even contradictory.
Similarly, I've mostly criticised the school inspectors, and yet I think its good that their actions are undermining Christian fundmentalism. This might make what I've written sound confusing, but at least I've defeated the halo effect.