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All of FiveMuru's Comments + Replies

Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)
FiveMuru10

One can have two pictures in a room: one of a man leaping into a sure-death trap labeled 3/4/11, the other of the same man sitting with his family labeled 3/5/11. The picture is not the thing itself and so unless one attempts to force homogeneity on the depictions there will be no laws of reality wrathfully reaching out and destroying one of the photos.

Have you ever used Prolog? It is easy to tell a program (or a mind) conflicting information. Once something is recorded, it is 'believed,' because no matter what, that data exists on it's o... (read more)

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Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable
FiveMuru20

I really appreciate your argument about the differences between claims made in the old and new testament.

Unfortunately, I generally expect to read rational and thought provoking facts here and was slightly disappointed. There are some facts which simple google searches seem to refute (such as rather large Jewish populations were ever enslaved in Egypt) and arguments that lean on sentiment against practices supposedly endorsed in the Bible which are either not actually endorsed in the Bible (such as slavery which while being a Hebrew practice, is never endo... (read more)

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9Said Achmiz
While not wishing to contradict Raemon’s comment in any way, I do want to say that the question of which factual claims in the Sequences hold up, and which do not, is an interesting one, separately from the matter of whether any one of those claims is particularly critical to the post in which it appears. FiveMuru (or anyone else), if this is a subject that interests you, I’d love to hear more about which of Eliezer’s claims about the Bible, etc., you think are inaccurate. Over at readthesequences.com, you’ll find that each of the essays of the Sequences has a Talk page (here’s the talk page for “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable”, for instance); you’re welcome to post your comments on this subject there!
6Raemon
Hey FiveMaru, welcome to the forum! There's a bit of background context here that might not be obvious if you're coming from other internet communities focusing on rationality or science (especially ones focused on debunking myths). The way the LessWrong zeitgeist relates to religion/supernatural claims is something like "okay, we agree that supernatural claims are bogus... now what?". The goal is to build our rationality skills such that they can help solve harder or more novel problems, rather than rehashing most debates about religion. So the context of this post is less about religion itself, and more about an overall cluster of ways that rationalists/skeptics/etc could still use to improve their own thinking.