The real difficulty is in that "neutral reading" part. Easy enough if you're not a Christian, but if you are...
I suspect it would be difficult for a non-Christian as well. Biased in the opposite direction is not the same as unbiased.
But it can be lost on the audience. I remember one time when I was going undercover in a Christian church and I was in an adult group that had a Christmas gathering and they kicked it off by going around the room and having everyone tell the story of at what age they stopped believing in Santa Claus. Mine involved something about my circle of friends shunning those who started insisting that SC wasn't real, and then welcoming back those who "saw the light".
The irony -- of how many of them had been in a position just like that, but with Santa Claus replaced by God -- was lost on everyone.
Non-Christians are not necessarily biased. I have observed a few non-religious (but non-atheist) people who had never ever read the Bible trying to read a random passage and collapse on the floor in laughter from the sheer absurdity of it. Same experiment with reading (a good-quality modern English adaptation of) Shakespeare tends to result in at least some interest.
Though, to quote EY,
I'm on record as stating that the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is more emotionally moving than Romeo and Juliet.
I suspect that the Bible, like nonreligious literature, was written to have literary merit according to the tastes of its original audience(s), but that the criteria by which literary merit is judged have shifted so dramatically in the intervening millenia that it now requires scholarly explanation.
Shakespeare, strange as it sounds, is essentially modern literature from that standpoint. (Although enough time has passed that vowel shifts have managed to obscure many of the rhymes in Shakespeare.)
I suspect that the Bible, like nonreligious literature, was written to have literary merit according to the tastes of its original audience(s),...
The more accurate way to describe the New Testament is not to say that "it was written", but that "it was compiled as a selection from multiple works on a similar topic, for a religious purpose". If anything "was meant" by that selection process, I'd consider literary merit far below religious and political purpose.
Whatever process you use to make your decisions is what determines your effectiveness.
And your purpose.
Not necessarily biased, certainly. But the fraction of humans who are, if not unbiased, at least unbiased enough, is a pretty small fraction in any group, religious or not. You can't pick out a random atheist and expect them to be an objective reasoner.
ETA Not sure why this is downvoted. The observation that not all atheists are rationalists should not be a controversial one.
Of course, but one can follow something like a jury selection process to resolve neutrality issues like this.
Today's post, Fake Justification was originally published on 01 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
We should be suspicious of our tendency to justify our decisions with arguments that were not actually the deciding factor. Whatever process you use to make your decisions is what determines your effectiveness.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was A Case Study of Motivated Continuation, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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