Lumifer comments on Existential Risk and Existential Hope: Definitions - LessWrong

7 Post author: owencb 10 January 2015 07:09PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 13 January 2015 09:38:59PM 1 point [-]

This seems to conflate people's values with their asserted values.

So replace "Christians" with "people who truly believe in the coming Day of Judgement and hope for eternal life".

Comment author: fubarobfusco 13 January 2015 10:11:41PM 0 points [-]

I had a college roommate who went through a phase where he wanted to die and go to heaven as soon as possible, but believed that committing suicide was a mortal sin.

So he would do dangerous things — like take walks in the middle of the (ill-lit, semi-rural) road from campus to town, wearing dark clothing, at night — to increase (or so he said) his chances of being accidentally killed.

Most Christians don't do that sort of thing. Most Christians behave approximately as sensibly as *humanists do with regard to obvious risks to life. This suggests that they actually do possess values very similar to *humanist values, and that their assertions otherwise are tribal cheering.

(It may be that my roommate was just signaling extreme devotion in a misguided attempt to impress his crush, who was the leader of the college Christian club.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 January 2015 01:36:16AM 0 points [-]

Note that one can be a religious Christian and still act that way. Catholics consider taking deliberately risky behavior like that to itself be sinful for example.