Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by ben_w on Monday November 05, 2018 @01:45PM
(#18384768)
Good points. Can you go into more detail about “not every set of religious beliefs is equally probable”?
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Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by philwelch on Monday November 05, 2018 @05:37PM
(#18386637)
That would literally be a religious argument, so I won't name examples, but many religious beliefs can either be tested empirically, have implications that can be tested empirically. If the religion exists in a social or organizational context where there are obvious vested worldly interests for the leaders of an organization to further certain beliefs (money, power, etc.) and those beliefs are designed to further those worldly interests, that would be a signal of improbability as well. Furthermore, for two sets of religious beliefs that share the same base texts and doctrines, the theological and exegetical doctrines can be judged on their own logic and decide between the two.
To put it bluntly (and give a contrived, fictitious example), a religion that believes in a flat earth that rests on the back of a unicorn that was created by a committee of gods 34 months ago (complete with false evidence and memories of what happened before) based on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the New Testament that demands that you give 75% of your money to The Glorious Spiritual Leader and then have sex with him, would be particularly improbable compared to almost any other religion.
Re:Cemeteries are landfills, and can contain all sorts of po...
by ben_w on Friday November 09, 2018 @05:54AM
(#18413625)
Thanks. Would it be reasonable for me to assume that you have a religious belief? I ask because your explanation seems like the kind of reasoning I would have used before I came to believe that no spiritual afterlife was plausible, and that all religions which claimed one were equally untrue (Boltzmann brains and digital afterlives are not spiritual in this sense, as they do not presume a nonphysical soul).