The uniquely awful example of theism

No - I think this comment just makes my earlier point, that we have such a negative impression of religion because we categorize anything irrational as "religion".

Consider Scientology. I think we can agree it's a religion. But it doesn't presuppose a spiritual realm which can cause effects in the natural world and yet not be investigated. It doesn't disclaim evidential reasoning; it actually relies on evidential reasoning. Just not very good evidential reasoning, which is designed primarily to have good stagecraft.

Consider Hinduism. It doesn't have much dogma. It isn't about making claims about the world the way Christianity or Islam is. It's more like a catalog of Jungian archetypes and models for thinking about the world. A Hindu "God" isn't a cause of events in the world, it's more like a manifestation of patterns of events.

Consider Buddhism. It doesn't have any "offstage" place for events that impact our world.

Consider animism. It also is very brief on dogma. It's very evidential. The volcano erupted; therefore, the volcano god is angry.

Consider Unitarianism. Brief on dogma. It's mainly about community.

So why do we call these things religions? Because "religion", the way most non-LW people (can we call them MW people?) use it, has to do with providing explanations, perspectives, guidelines, and community.

Just to suggest another belief (and belief system) that at least approaches that frontier:

"There has not been one tax increase in history that actually raised revenue. And every tax cut, from the 1920s to Kennedy’s to ours, has produced more."

-Ronald Reagan to David Stockman and Martin Feldstein.

(It is perhaps only coincidental that the year was 1984.)

http://books.google.com/books?id=dBlELVvaj4cC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=%22There+has+not+been+one+tax+increase+in+history%22+reagan+stockman&source=bl&ots=MbAlKL-1Xt&sig=FXF-KfDngpgcArtRX5ERD7gvlic&hl=en&ei=oaYFSqL_PKG8tAPXiKn3AQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

Deserves its own post.

Seconding Eliezer. This is insightful.

You're right. Religion really is distilled, purified essence of bullshit.

Underrepresentation is not lack of representation.

One problem with economists is this lazy tendency to describe economic solutions as "efficient" or having "benefits" without describing the goals with respect to which they are efficient, or who and what they benefit.

Also, most of the standard derivations of the benefits of market solutions have multiple flaws:

1. They assume a level of competition among producers and consumers which doesn't arise in practice
2. They assume a level of rational decision making among actors which doesn't arise in practice
3. They assume that the rules of the game (laws, taxes, spending decisions, standards, property rights including IPR etc) are neutral and so put everyone on a level playing field from the start. They don't.

The consequences of this are quite well known. Strong countries demand "free trade" from weak countries (and get it) while maintaining barriers to trade for their own products (agriculture, weapons etc.) which - very mysteriously - never go away. Corporations preach the wonders of competition, while carefully managing (or reducing) competition in their own sectors through mergers, IPR, brand protection, standards, licensing and a whole host of other tricks. (Regulators, even formal competition authorities, often help them). Financial institutions demand de-regulation (which they get) but then grow too big to fail, and subsequently demand bailouts when they make collosal mistakes threatening the whole system (and they get those too). Then they put all the blame on governments for over-spending, and demand huge spending cuts to maintain national credit ratings (and amazingly that happens as well). Economists acknowledge that externalities (like pollution, global warming impacts from fossil fuels) should be priced in (via taxes or tradeable quotas), but then that never happens (taxes are too unpopular, or the price is deliberately kept too low by giving out excessive quotas). And so on.

I think that marijuana legalization in particular can be used as an example we all agree about. (Does anyone reading this actually disagree about that? Leave a comment if so.)

The so-called terrorism threat?

I still have that I must be missing something feeling about that one. It seems so obvious that terrorism is very low down on the chart of public health problems, and that little would do more to defeat their aims than treating it as such; but when someone like Hitchens takes it seriously, I really want to know if there's an argument I haven't considered.

I guess you'd claim that things like forwarding chain letters, belief in homoeopathy or healing crystals or orgone guns, the 'nature is good' fallacy and whatnot aren't common enough.

How about astrology? I had a physics teacher in high school who believed in horoscopes!

Suppose you have an extremely high prior probability for God sending doubters to Hell, for whatever reason. Presumably the utility of going to Hell is very, very low. Then, as a rational Bayesian, you should avoid any evidence that would tend to cause you to doubt God, shouldn't you?

This is a preference over rituals of cognition, choosing not just decisions, but the algorithms with which you arrive at those decisions. It is usually assumed that only the decisions matter, not the thought process. If you did live in such a world, I agree, you should avoid getting into a doubt-state, although it might be the case that you'd benefit from building an external reasoning device that would resolve the problem for you, not being hindered by limitations on the allowed cognitive algorithms.

Also, I guess that an altruistic person should still undergo a conversion to rationality, on the chance that the evidence points out that the inborn priors are incorrect, thus sparing his fellow people living under such limitations on thought.

Suppose you have an extremely high prior probability for God sending doubters to Hell, for whatever reason. Presumably the utility of going to Hell is very, very low. Then, as a rational Bayesian, you should avoid any evidence that would tend to cause you to doubt God, shouldn't you? I certainly don't know much of Bayesian probability, but I can't see any flaw in that logic.

This is a deep and important topic -- if I lived in the middle ages then if there exists any rationality principle that in practice would have allowed me to deconvert from medieval christianity despite hell threats, I'm not sure what exactly that principle is, though it seems like there should be one.

Good call, but comments on OB posts dealing with these subjects suggest far from "just about everyone here" has seen through them.

FW and MR are defensible in non naive forms, and just about any naive theory is wrong. So why was pick on MR and FW?

My recent post on average utilitarianism lends support to moral realism. That's why I found it surprising, and why I found it surprising that (presumably non-moral-realist) people here could read it, give it some credence, yet not consider it important.

"libertarian political positions" are all over the map, so I have to agree (though I'm a libertarian: 100x100 on the WSPQ about that one. I wonder whether it wouldn't be productive for a sceptic to pick out one or a few of the positions that are generally agreed on by economists (mattnewport's list above is a reasonable starting point: free trade, price controls, open immigration; I'd add taxes reduce productivity) and start a discussion of what you think the weak points are.

edited to use proper LW linking

Of course, it would only work if one or a few people who disagree with the majority position were committed to making their best argument and sticking to the discussion even as they get (predictably) piled on by others. Perhaps we need a better way to manage such discussions by reducing the number of participants so a few people can have time to consider all of the points being made.

I re-found this yesterday and I'm just gonna link it. Empirical data against libertarianism!

How is one small movement of amateur philosophers dissing another going to play? It's like the Mormon saying the seventh day Adventist are wrong, (Agree that Objectivism sucks BTW)

This is, after all, an advanced rationality forum -- one expects folks here to either be well beyond giving serious consideration to the claims of religion, or at the very least interested enough in epistemology to be able to stomach critiques of theism.

I'm glad to know that we are so much more advanced at being Bayesian rationalists than silly folks like Robert Aumann or, uh, the Reverend Thomas Bayes.

Yes, I'm being snide, but this sounds a bit too self-congratulating. Are we really in a position to be all but saying "these specific beliefs are a prerequisite for posting"?

I'm in an ongoing conversation with a couple of LDS missionaries, and those incommunicable experiences seem to be their primary argument. They say they can't convince me Mormonism is true on their own, but if I read, and I pray, and I work, I'll just have that experience myself and I'll know it. And if I had more spare time, I would do all those things, primarily to give them Bayesian evidence that it's actually not true (I keep meaning to pick up my Book of Mormon, but, well, particle physics to read, LW posts to write, root documentation to go through, etc etc etc)

The primary argument that I have given back, though, is that religious experiences of this stripe simply aren't unique to Mormonism. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, and ravers taking E have all had similar transcendent experiences. It is naive to take it as Bayesian evidence of mormonism.true.

Intelligent theists who commit to rationality also seem to say that their "revelatory experience" is less robust than scientific, historical, or logical knowledge/experience.

For example, if they interpret their revelation to say that God created all animal species separately, then scientific evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that that is untrue, then they must have misinterpreted their revelatory experience (I believe this is the Catholic Church's current position, for example). Similarly if their interpretation of their revelation contradicts logical arguments; logic wins over revelation.

This seems consistent with the idea that they have had a strange experience that they are trying to incorporate into their other experience.

For me personally, I have a hard time imagining a private experience that would convince me that God has revealed something to me. I would think it far more likely that I had simply gone temporarily crazy (or at least as crazy as other people who have had other, contradictory revelations). So I don't think that such "experiences" should update my state of information, and I don't update based on others' claims of those experiences either.

The argument I use on incommunicable experiences is this: how do you go about working out if a sensation is internally or externally generated? Obviously to think that all of your sensations are internally generated is just to deny the useful distinction between inside and outside, but it's clear that some experiences do come from inside, so how do you tell? Are you tuning in to the Great Ringing, or is it just tinnitus?

You need to define "fundamentalist" for us, then. Originally, it meant a liberal interpretation of Christianity that would admit anyone who subscribed to a short list of (then nearly-universally-held) fundamental doctrines.

I find that they act and speak exactly like they're applying rational principles to experiences that they have had

I run into a common wall with rationality applied to religious experience: Examining the details of their objections to materialistic hypotheses for their experience. Rationality demands doubt, however small. In my experience, this doubt is forcefully rejected in a noticeably irrational manner. But my sample is not large.

Right. It's basically a family association; different religions will share different things in common, but there's no real core concept. If anything, I'd suggest "a system of principles and beliefs for living one's life," in which case, yes, rationalism would be a religion as well.

Most of them are held by very few people, so they're bad examples.

A few of them are not obviously wrong so they're also bad examples - for example polygraph might as well be an useful truth finding device, there's just zero evidence for it; or psychoanalysis might as well be useful as therapeutic device; or some races might be "superior" to others in some meaningful sense like intelligence etc. I'm not saying any of that is likely to be true, just on completely other level of wrongness than God and marijuana criminalization.

Ha ha, this comment shows up on the Recent Comments feed at right as:

" Racism and sexism are pretty good

by SeanMCoincon on The uniquely awful example of theism | 0 points "

THAT certainly couldn't be misconstrued against me in any way! I think I'll run for Congress.

I doubt many would affirm that they should do this, though, and we're looking for explicitly held beliefs.

I think I'd like to hear it.

I disagree with byrnema's opinions; but that isn't a reason to downvote byrnema in this context. We are not discussing whether theism & drug war are rational; we're discussing whether they are uncontroversial on LW.

gjm claimed the badness of theism is uncontroversial on LW; others claimed the badness of the drug war is uncontroversial on LW. byrnema provided a datapoint that disproved them both. Hence, I upvoted byrnema, even though the disconfirmation of our consensus disappointed me. I also would rather encourage bravery than discourage it.

This is not cut-and-dried, since we can also display our degree of consensus by upvoting and downvoting things we agree and disagree with. I guess I'm making a special exception for someone who provides us with datapoints on issues that we already know there is a general consensus on here on LW; while continuing to use up/downvoting to indicate my opinion of other topics (eg global warming). For instance, when NeedleFactory says he thinks there is consensus here that humans don't cause global warming, that's astonishing, and I should perhaps downvote it to show there is no such consensus.

The prediction "No doubt I'll be voted down for this" proved correct. Is it rational to downvote someone for making a correct prediction?

As I have commented once already today, I vote down all comments that start "No doubt I'll be voted down for this, but..." If I had another downvote to give for asserting that theism can be rational with not a word to defend it and a third for the inevitable cheap accusation of groupthink, you'd get those too.

"Theism" is too loose to really argue about it being rational or irrational with providing specific examples. If I just choose a random theism from a list, the odds are high it will be pretty irrational.

Is it theoretically plausible to create a rational theism? Probably, but getting it qualified as...
a) Theistic
b) Rational
c) Religious

... may find you stuck in a war of semantics.

Regarding AGW:

I am not an expert on climate. I am not qualified to judge the evidence myself. If someone tried to present me with evidence for or against AGW, I would not be able to tell the difference between real evidence and numbers pulled out of someone's ass. All I can do is appeal to scientific consensus, and the consensus on AGW seems solid. If you have a problem with the consensus view, telling me about it will get you nowhere; take it up with the experts, as Stephen McIntyre of ClimateAudit appears to have done.

So, yeah, majoritarianism is my explicit justification for accepting AGW. And if you're not an expert, then rejecting AGW will cause me to think you're being overconfident and a bit silly

Well, I certainly hope that most people here don't believe that it matters what the cause of global warming is...

Not with you on either of those.

Belief in democracy as opposed to what?

I dare say more of us believe in democracy here than we believe in any other system that has yet been tried (theocracy, monarchy, military dictatorship, etc).

Believing democracy to be irrational is probably a result of mistaking it's purpose. We say democracy is the best system because it lets the wisdom of the crowd influence decisions and it moderates governments but it wasn't installed nor expanded for that reason. Charles didn't sit on his throne and think, "by golly, this ruling business is pretty hard, I better get some help" and the parliamentarians didn't get stumped centuries later and decide to see if women had any better ideas. People fought for suffrage for their class to advance it's position in society, to at least some degree of success in every case.