[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Belacqua]

I personally have no problem with anyone adopting a position because it's comforting for them, 

The trouble I see is that people sometimes assume this is the reason why positions are adopted, without really knowing. So you've got zillions of Christians and other religious people believing a wide variety of things for a wide variety of reasons, and somebody will just announce "they believe that because it's comforting." Well, maybe, but we don't really know. And it's not good to pretend we can do mind-reading.

After all, some Christians do their own mind-reading, and announce that atheists deep down really do believe in god, but adopt an atheist position because it's comforting to think there's no judgment. 

I don't want to do that kind of thing.

but as soon as one comes here to defend such position and in such a confident manner, then they're acting like it's intellectual and it's understandable to expect them to back up their position with something concrete rather than arguing from ignorance or appealing to their personal intuitions ... 

Yes, indeed. People will come here and confidently proclaim that their position is correct, based on their mind-reading. Or their intuitions. 

I would like people to back up what they say with intellectual arguments and concrete evidence. Somebody here was making a classic argument from ignorance just yesterday: "I don't know of any evidence therefore I am sure the thing doesn't exist." If it's bad for Christians to use logical fallacies, then it's bad for us too. 

or adopting naive and clearly false understanding of cognitive/developmental social/psychological phenomena ...

This is a constant problem. 

For example, it's been frequently and confidently asserted that religion is a failed attempt to explain natural phenomena, and that it started out 100% literalist and due to the advancement of science had to be converted to figurative. 

This is an over-simple, almost certainly false understanding of complex social/psychological stuff.

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Just now on another thread, the poster called Simon Moon wrote this:

I agree with others, there is no reason to take the position that there is no soul, in a debate. Why take on the burden of proof, unnecessarily?

Here, he is agreeing with Acrobat and me that if you positively assert the non-existence of something, you take on a burden of proof.

On that thread he is arguing against the existence of a soul. Since his position is generally anti-religion/superstition, his statement about a burden of proof won't be challenged, I expect.

[Anomalocaris]

The universal and indispensable foundation of theism is the refusal to accept reality as deduced from a sound and validatable process and determination to assert something else in its place that feels more comfortable.    The theist in most cases could not very well admit what is comfortable has no valid reason to be thought of as being true, because doing so would destroy his ability to derive comfort from the comfortable.    If comfort is that important, and one has already crossed the cognitive Rubicon to embrace what provides comfort in place of what is more probably true,  then there is relatively unlikely to be any other serious cognitive barrier against embracing whatever more wish thinking intellectual self-deception is required to defend the intellectually indefensible.

Hence, in many if not most cases, the Christian claiming not to be a fundamentalist is already in for the penny, and has torn out any innate intellectual safeguards against also being in for the pound.

I personally have no problem with anyone adopting a position because it's comforting for them, but as soon as one comes here to defend such position and in such a confident manner, then they're acting like it's intellectual and it's understandable to expect them to back up their position with something concrete rather than arguing from ignorance or appealing to their personal intuitions ... or adopting naive and clearly false understanding of cognitive/developmental social/psychological phenomena …

I have no problem with people adopting a comfortable position because it's comfortable for them, such as their children being talented, their wives faithful, or the cost of carbon fiber golf clubs really is a down payment on a better game.    But such positions usually do not require that policies affecting millions and posterity onto many generations be shaped to primarily to coddle fantasies.

Theist religious comfort is usually a totally different beast.   To start with, to be religious comfort means it is not conceived by the individual to serve his own comfort.   Rather it was designed and further evolved to create an block of followers to be able to shape policies affecting as many as possible for as long as possible.   Nothing would become a religion unless it has aspiration of shaping policies to suit itself.     Thus by default religious comfort is without the innocuousness that made the foolish quest for private comfort through private self-deception innocent.   


Further, religious comforts are usually conceived and evolved to impose a unifying fantasy amongst people who talks amongst themselves.   So it typically strive as much as possible to be all things to all people.    So religious comfort tend to not be economical.  Instead they tend to be based on extravagant, overarching lies that cover as many aspects as possible in order to smothers the intellectual outlook of its victims to the maximum degree that will be tolerated.   Thus religious comfort not only is part and parcel of fantasies concocted to shape some specific policies, the policy shaping must involve discouragement if not the suppression of anything that might penetrate its extensive array of overarching lies.  Thus religious comfort supports not only policy making via fantasy, but efforts to extend influence into ever broader range of policies.

[GrandizerII]

I personally have no problem with anyone adopting a position because it's comforting for them, 

The trouble I see is that people sometimes assume this is the reason why positions are adopted, without really knowing. So you've got zillions of Christians and other religious people believing a wide variety of things for a wide variety of reasons, and somebody will just announce "they believe that because it's comforting." Well, maybe, but we don't really know. And it's not good to pretend we can do mind-reading.

After all, some Christians do their own mind-reading, and announce that atheists deep down really do believe in god, but adopt an atheist position because it's comforting to think there's no judgment. 

I don't want to do that kind of thing.

And no one here is. They're just going with what's obviously the case in specific individuals who have made it clear they're adopting positions for comfort rather than for the sake of intellectual honesty, even if those people wouldn't explicitly state it like that.

Yes, indeed. People will come here and confidently proclaim that their position is correct, based on their mind-reading. Or their intuitions. 

I would like people to back up what they say with intellectual arguments and concrete evidence. Somebody here was making a classic argument from ignorance just yesterday: "I don't know of any evidence therefore I am sure the thing doesn't exist." If it's bad for Christians to use logical fallacies, then it's bad for us too.

In the case of God, then one can reasonably believe God (in the supernatural sense) does not exist because the evidence that is strongly expected for such a grand entity just isn't there. If it isn't there, then it's very likely such a being does not exist. If someone says they're sure, though, based on lack of evidence, then that would be unreasonable.

or adopting naive and clearly false understanding of cognitive/developmental social/psychological phenomena ...

This is a constant problem. 

For example, it's been frequently and confidently asserted that religion is a failed attempt to explain natural phenomena, and that it started out 100% literalist and due to the advancement of science had to be converted to figurative. 

This is an over-simple, almost certainly false understanding of complex social/psychological stuff.

Yes, but here's the thing. If you can actually explain how what they're saying is wrong, most of them (I bet) will pay attention and correct their stances on this matter. But in this whole thread, I haven't seen anyone (theist or atheist) show that (almost certainly) Genesis was meant to not be taken literally from the start. Instead, when I asked for supporting argument from Acrobat, I got the kind of response that showed they don't have a good understanding of how myths can start and then develop. Stories progress over time with more details and tend to be more elaborate over time to the point it becomes almost a different story from the original. Furthermore, it is clear that people in the past took for granted all sorts of absurd things we don't accept anymore thanks to modern science (a skim through a history of religion book would do good for those who question this).

[Belacqua]

Yes, but here's the thing. If you can actually explain how what they're saying is wrong, most of them (I bet) will pay attention and correct their stances on this matter. But in this whole thread, I haven't seen anyone (theist or atheist) show that (almost certainly) Genesis was meant to not be taken literally from the start. Instead, when I asked for supporting argument from Acrobat, I got the kind of response that showed they don't have a good understanding of how myths can start and then develop. Stories progress over time with more details and tend to be more elaborate over time to the point it becomes almost a different story from the original. Furthermore, it is clear that people in the past took for granted all sorts of absurd things we don't accept anymore thanks to modern science (a skim through a history of religion book would do good for those who question this).

I don't think anybody knows what was in the minds of the first authors of Genesis. 

If someone makes the claim that the stories were meant to be literal, that claim needs some back-up beyond intuition. It may be true, but I see no reason to believe it, given what we know of how ancient societies wrote myths. 

One current theory (based on historical and linguistic research) is that both the northern and southern Jewish kingdoms wrote similar creation stories out of whole cloth, intended to give a national identity that could counter the influence of stronger countries to the north. The authors knew full well that there was no empirical reason to make stories like this; they were spiritual, national, self-justifying myths from the beginning. Again, I don't know if that's true. But it's backed up by more than intuition. 

As I have said many times, it's true that stories progress and often lose their original meanings. This is a good and useful thing about myths. But it does nothing to strengthen the idea that the myths were originally meant literally.

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In the case of God, then one can reasonably believe God (in the supernatural sense) does not exist because the evidence that is strongly expected for such a grand entity just isn't there. If it isn't there, then it's very likely such a being does not exist. If someone says they're sure, though, based on lack of evidence, then that would be unreasonable.

Here we get back to the constant problem of what a god would be like, and therefore what evidence would be required to identify it.

For the most part, when people say there is no evidence for one, they have in mind (tacitly or not) some idea of what a god would be like, and how we could detect it. Then based on their definition, they are reasonable to state that there is no evidence. 

And as always, we get back to the problem that the god they imagine is more like Zeus than like the god of the theologians. I completely agree that Zeus if he existed could be detected with scientific means. Since there is no evidence for him, and moreover good reason to think that such a creature would be incompatible with what we know of the world, it is reasonable to conclude that he never existed. 

It's very difficult to get past that type of god -- the one that anti-religion people are busy not believing in. But people who study the history of ideas all agree that such a god is impossible. Including all theologians. This leaves unanswered and unaddressed the kind of god the theologians talk about.

[Acrobat]

False sense of humanity?  Needing a god who fucked his own mother to give himself birth to have meaning in life is a truer sense of humanity?


I suppose the slave contented with the fellowship of the slave quarters and have no aspiration of ever being free might deem those who overtly embrace the potential afforded by self determination inhuman,  even though his slave master to whom he truckles so obsequiously lords it over him by realizing those very same potentials at his expense.

Hum, freedom? Many atheists seem to operate on some conception of freedom, like religious people as enslaved while they are free.

Yet this freedom they refer to clearly isn’t the sort of freedom afforded to us politically the sort all of us have, but some other kind?

There’s some sort of underlying concept of freedom they operate on, thats peculiar.

It also doesn’t seem to be an appeal, or a belief that this freedom they speak of is possessed by accepting some particular scientific or historic fact either.

Also, while they seem to be advocates of this peculiar freedom, they never seem to be possessers of it, they seem no more free than those who they accuse of being enslaved.

You seem to held captive to something.

You repeated the whole “god who fucked his own mother” twice already for what purpose? For my sake? probably not. But to provoke an emotional reaction, like in the use of insults. You feel some sort of miserableness contained in such expressions, and want to pass that miserableness on to others in hopes of relief, a relief that never comes. It probably from some undisclosed pain, as it usually does. It’s stuff like this, that seem to be the shackles, of this sort of peculiar freedom, that we both recognize, even if we don’t possess it ourselves.

[Belacqua]

Hum, freedom? Many atheists seem to operate on some conception of freedom, like religious people as enslaved while they are free.

Does nobody read the Divine Comedy any more at all? Or any of the other books on how good behavior for a Christian exactly equals freedom from obsessions, error, illusions, misdirections? 

These ideas are not difficult. Lots of people understand them. Yet idiots like Christopher Hitchens find it easier to declare that god is a kind of North Korean dictator. 

This is pure ideology, unencumbered by knowledge.

[GrandizerII]

Yes, but here's the thing. If you can actually explain how what they're saying is wrong, most of them (I bet) will pay attention and correct their stances on this matter. But in this whole thread, I haven't seen anyone (theist or atheist) show that (almost certainly) Genesis was meant to not be taken literally from the start. Instead, when I asked for supporting argument from Acrobat, I got the kind of response that showed they don't have a good understanding of how myths can start and then develop. Stories progress over time with more details and tend to be more elaborate over time to the point it becomes almost a different story from the original. Furthermore, it is clear that people in the past took for granted all sorts of absurd things we don't accept anymore thanks to modern science (a skim through a history of religion book would do good for those who question this).

I don't think anybody knows what was in the minds of the first authors of Genesis.

Great. Can we agree that both sides have been guilty of confident assertions regarding the first authors of Genesis?

If someone makes the claim that the stories were meant to be literal, that claim needs some back-up beyond intuition.

Likewise with someone who makes the claim that the stories were not meant to be literal ...

It may be true, but I see no reason to believe it, given what we know of how ancient societies wrote myths.

Given what I know about how people, living in remote villages away from the influence of modernism and naturalistic way of thinking, having the tendency to take these religious stories for granted, then it's reasonable that the ancient people back then more similar to these villagers than to modern scientifically-minded societies also perhaps took these stories for granted.

One current theory (based on historical and linguistic research) is that both the northern and southern Jewish kingdoms wrote similar creation stories out of whole cloth, intended to give a national identity that could counter the influence of stronger countries to the north. The authors knew full well that there was no empirical reason to make stories like this; they were spiritual, national, self-justifying myths from the beginning. Again, I don't know if that's true. But it's backed up by more than intuition.

I'll get back to you on this later.

In the case of God, then one can reasonably believe God (in the supernatural sense) does not exist because the evidence that is strongly expected for such a grand entity just isn't there. If it isn't there, then it's very likely such a being does not exist. If someone says they're sure, though, based on lack of evidence, then that would be unreasonable.

Here we get back to the constant problem of what a god would be like, and therefore what evidence would be required to identify it.

For the most part, when people say there is no evidence for one, they have in mind (tacitly or not) some idea of what a god would be like, and how we could detect it. Then based on their definition, they are reasonable to state that there is no evidence. 

And as always, we get back to the problem that the god they imagine is more like Zeus than like the god of the theologians. I completely agree that Zeus if he existed could be detected with scientific means. Since there is no evidence for him, and moreover good reason to think that such a creature would be incompatible with what we know of the world, it is reasonable to conclude that he never existed. 

It's very difficult to get past that type of god -- the one that anti-religion people are busy not believing in. But people who study the history of ideas all agree that such a god is impossible. Including all theologians. This leaves unanswered and unaddressed the kind of god the theologians talk about.

I'm talking about the kind of God theologians believe in. I don't see the evidence for such a god. I expect the evidence to be there. I do not have it. I also have sufficient naturalistic explanations for the various things we observe in this world. Therefore that god probably does not exist.

[Belacqua]

Given what I know about how people, living in remote villages away from the influence of modernism and naturalistic way of thinking, having the tendency to take these religious stories for granted, then it's reasonable that the ancient people back then more similar to these villagers than to modern scientifically-minded societies also perhaps took these stories for granted.

What do you know, non-intuitionally, concerning the thinking of these people? 

Are you sure the stories were meant to be literal explanations of nature? In every case? Or were they from the beginning intended as moral lessons? Are all such people the same? 

Then there's the question of who wrote the myths in Genesis. There's a common and almost certainly false assumption that they began with "bronze age goat-herders." Some historians think that the myths originated with the most educated and literate people long after the Bronze Age, for clear political and moral purposes.

[GrandizerII]

Given what I know about how people, living in remote villages away from the influence of modernism and naturalistic way of thinking, having the tendency to take these religious stories for granted, then it's reasonable that the ancient people back then more similar to these villagers than to modern scientifically-minded societies also perhaps took these stories for granted.

What do you know, non-intuitionally, concerning the thinking of these people? 

I lived with them. I was born in a village with church at center and where everyone knew everyone else. I like, you know, talked to them and they, you know, told me things.

[Anomalocaris]

False sense of humanity?  Needing a god who fucked his own mother to give himself birth to have meaning in life is a truer sense of humanity?


I suppose the slave contented with the fellowship of the slave quarters and have no aspiration of ever being free might deem those who overtly embrace the potential afforded by self determination inhuman,  even though his slave master to whom he truckles so obsequiously lords it over him by realizing those very same potentials at his expense.

Hum, freedom? Many atheists seem to operate on some conception of freedom, like religious people as enslaved while they are free.

Yet this freedom they refer to clearly isn’t  the sort of freedom afforded to us politically the sort all of us have, but some other kind?

There’s some sort of underlying concept of freedom they operate on, thats peculiar.

It also doesn’t seem to be an appeal, or a belief that this freedom they speak of is possessed by accepting some particular scientific or historic fact either.

Also, while they seem to be advocates of this peculiar freedom, they never seem to be possessers of it, they seem no more free than those who they accuse of being enslaved.

You seem to held captive to something.

You repeated the whole “god who fucked his own mother” twice already for what purpose? For my sake? probably not. But to provoke an emotional reaction, like in the use of insults. You feel some sort of miserableness contained in such expressions, and want to pass that miserableness on to others in hopes of relief, a relief that never comes. It probably from some undisclosed pain, as it usually does. It’s stuff like this, that seem to be the shackles, of this sort of peculiar freedom, that we both recognize, even if we don’t possess it ourselves.

It's peculiar in the same way pursuit of real understanding of reality is peculiar to those who find happy delusion entirely sufficient for the small wish thinking life that looks for nothing bigger, better founded or more substantial.

I repeat it for the purpose of making it clear just what contortion and willful self deception your ilk go through to derive an ultimately sterile comfort from the morally sickening.