Special Status Needs Special Support

I think it can be difficult to bracket derivative texts when thinking about biblical texts. E.g., most people's understanding of Genesis is heavily influenced by Milton, so it seems reasonable to think that their evaluation of Genesis is confounded by their evaluation of Paradise Lost. Some of the poetic value of Paradise Lost redounds back to Genesis.

I think that a lot of the value that people assign to the bible exists in derivative texts (or memes) that are located outside of the bible---I submit that this is the elusive sacred quantity that Adam Frank is talking about. A poetic analysis of the string of characters comprising the Book of Job will turn up little, if any, of this external value. So of course the Bible has a greater sacred quantity than Lord of the Rings...it's got a several-thousand-year head start in generating derivative works.

I actually turn to Tolkien when I'm in what I assume other people would call a "religious" mood: he has the virtues of poetic/literary merit and mythological self-consistency; moreover the fact that everyone, including the author, knows that it's completely false and made-up gives a clean separation between my emotional response and any possible intellectual import.

I just watched this BHTV.

I thought Eliezer might have done better getting through to Frank by making a comparison, not to Tolkien but to other mythologies. For example, Norse mythology is a lot of fun, and I will probably even read it to my kids when I have some. If I do so, then whatever good morals there are in those stories can be emphasized, and whatever bad ones there are may either be skipped or looked upon as history lessons. Pithy phrases and metaphors from the books may be freely used as literary tropes.

If Frank only wants to do that with the Bible, I suppose that would be all right (with a few caveats). But I don't think that's what he has in mind when he speaks of "drawing meaning" from holy books.

Frank's sophisticated Christians, for example, are going a lot further than merely saying "This mythology appeals to me on a cultural/aesthetic level," as evidenced (i.a.) by their unwillingness to use words like "mythology" and "false."

It's basically a shell game, a credulity-laundering operation. The public gets "sophisticated" flummery about metaphor and meaning, and in the privacy of their homes, their children are handed the old prejudices as heirlooms.

yet if you talked about Tolkien the way that Frank talked about Job, most people would write you down as a hopeless fanboy/fangirl...

Yet another reason for denying religion its special status: if we could just admit that most of humanity cares deeply for silly ideas, there'd be less tendancy to reject silly-sounding new concepts out of hand...

When I think about the Bible, I feel the links to real life experiences activate, memories of being dragged to church by force, talking to people poisoned by it, thinking about the destruction it wrought and the danger it poses. If you squint really hard you can almost see a dark aura emanating from the pages. Lord of the Rings is by comparison just pleasant PG-13 fun, a bit too long-winded at times and perfectly innocuous.

Really, there is a difference between the Bible and LoTR.

You're repeating yourself.

For anyone interested in wearing Frodo's ring around your neck: http://www.myprecious.us/

you don't see people wearing little rings around their neck in memory of Frodo

I suspect you mean something like ‘you see many many fewer people wearing little rings than crosses’, but if you mean it literally it (slightly) surprises me and my model of the world (in particular, the part of the world you're in) needs updating.

Are you going to do a bloggingheads with that guy who defeated Christopher Hitchens in a debate? (Or is "that guy" Adam Frank?) Either way, I'd really like to see it.

Eliezer: have you pointed out to Adam Frank that he's mispronouncing your name?

Scholars estimate that the book of Job, probably the work of multiple authors, was composed some time between the seventh and fifth centuries B.C.E. When comparing didactic poetry, does the fact that the book of Job is so old have anything to do with the reverence or specialness which some modern readers attach to it? Furthermore, is Job really a fitting example of Sacred Truth rather than, say, "sacred perplexity"? Is advanced age in a wisdom narrative a necessary condition of Sacredness? Is there something special about "touching the old," harkening back to an Overcoming Bias post by that name?

When I think about the Bible, I feel the links to real life experiences activate, memories of being dragged to church by force, talking to people poisoned by it, thinking about the destruction it wrought and the danger it poses. If you squint really hard you can almost see a dark aura emanating from the pages. Lord of the Rings is by comparison just pleasant PG-13 fun, a bit too long-winded at times and perfectly innocuous.

Really, there is a difference between the Bible and LoTR.

Here: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/19610

I seem to always only get round to reading posts well after the conversation about them is over, but anyway....

I think that Frank probably doesn't consciously know exactly why he has that opinion about that item, and that his justification is just a rationalisation.

If you want to avoid doing this sort of thing, you have to try and catch yourself when you're about to rationalise something.

You have to be aware that there can be unconsicous or implicit components behind your opinions, that these reasons can often not be very good. On the basis of this, you need to make the decision to try and evaluate opinions that come to mind.

You should be trying to feel out whether you do have a true sense of their justification, or whether you have to start searching for a rationalisation. I think this is possible to do (at least some of the time).

you don't see people wearing little rings around their neck in memory of Frodo.

An odd claim, and just patently false. See one ring to wear around your neck from the site mentioned below.

It's no more a bias than is the equally common mistake of believing that if "if A then B" is given, then knowing B allows us to deductively conclude A.

I think the term bias should be reserved for heuristics and cognitive optimizations which exist for very good evolutionary reasons but often go horribly awry, as opposed to things like "affirming the consequent" or the sloppy thought process you mentioned, which are symptomatic of an absent cognitive skill that we never had good reason to develop. The bias exploits a heavily selected-for cognitive process, whereas common logical ignorance is just a function of logical skill not really being part of our evolutionary heritage.

In the case of emergent or even semi-design cultural systems special status is equated with special support, by default. It's an unstated tautology of the culture.

When a collection of stories or a collection of words is given treated in a ritualistic way by a cultural structure they take on part of the ritualization (I'm using something close to Catherine Bell's usage here) - which both requires them to take on special status and protects them from the critique which other tales or books may receive.

There's nothing particularly theistic or religious about it. You can see the same thing if you look carefully at the enshrinement of some science textbooks.

We will make rituals about anything.

One advantage of seriously experiencing rituals and ritualization is understanding the effects it can have on your decisions. And again, ritual is as important for secular culture as it is for spiritual and theistic culture.

So it's easy to begin seeing this bias when you've peeled away the layers of ritualization and you've moved out of the cultural reference frame that quietly gave the special support.

The scary part is that we don't start seeing it nearly so easily while we're still within the culture. After all, it is one of the assumptions we don't even realize we're making.

The sacred is sacred not solely because of its inherent properties but because it just is -- that is, a group of people have for a multitude of reasons and historical contigencies focused on this text, place, or object and assigned it a special status. This doesn't make much rationalist sense -- it's just the way these sort of things work.

re: 'Special...'

I like Sagan's "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" formulation better.

And on a somewhat irrelevant note - Tolkien is great poetry? He's recitable, certainly, and his translations of 'The Pearl' or 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' are justly lauded; but his own poetry isn't too great.

('Sing hey! For the bath at close of day \ that washes the weary mud away...')

Frank and Eliezer both miss the point. It's really a question of priorities - is "starting over," in Eliezer's terms, a productive endeavor?

I think no. It's not that these institutions or texts have any special aesthetic or epistemic value, they're just really powerful. There's a reason the Catholic Church has been around for so long. We know that the religious can live in a socially responsible manner, just as we know that atheists are capable of great evil. It seems to me to be a horse and cart question - I think increasing standards of living lead to lower levels of religiosity, so going after religiosity before we tackle global poverty is backwards.

Personally I think the best atheists have to hope for in the near term is a reconciliation with religion built around the social value of voluntary spiritual practice.

It would have been helpful to interrogate Eliezer's Newtonian/relativity analogy a little more. We have reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics in the context of relativity and quantum mechanics, and now we use it as an approximation for human-scale events. In a similar way there are elements of religion that we can use as a moral shorthand. The deeply religious we can agree with understand their beliefs as such and have a deep appreciation for the yet-undiscovered unified moral field theory. While Eliezer's 12 Virtues are good for cold iron/hot iron syllogisms they don't give us any guidance on the fundamental moral questions. Some forms of religion give guidance I can agree with.

In contrast we have Eliezer's space opera. What he misses is that this story is just as morally suspect as religion is logically suspect. To organize for cryonics, space colonies et al. in the current era is to work for a very specific class interest, whether or not you see it that way.

Eliezer's climate change point belies his provincial attitude. In many parts of the world religious communities justifiably view Western secularism as the socially and ecologically destructive force. His inane reaction to Franks' reference to creative misreading was surprising. The notion that historical mythologies are reinterpreted by contemporary powers should be germane to Less Wrong readers. Liberal humanists should look to do the same.