Homosexuality and "Love the sinner, hate the sin"

[Bakustra]

Why does the proposition that truth is dependent on the number of contending positions follow? Also, explain how the question of whether there is a god or not and what form his supernatural precepts take is like looking at a cloud. That seems very demeaning and insulting to me.

PS: Are you sure you want to walk down the road of strict social construction, Simon?

[Bakustra]

Doublepost: Another thing. If we treat this fairly, Simon, rather than dishonestly ignoring atheism, we would have to conclude that atheism is more likely to be false as well, because it too is incompatible with all of the others.

[Kanastrous]

Seems rather like prima facie evidence that none of you are right, but I guess that's another topic.

Can't say I disagree with you there. Or maybe one of us IS right (cue spooky laughter). I was raised in the Catholic faith, and its moral lessons are pretty solid IMO even if I question some tenets of the church.

I don't think that the qualities of the moral teachings of a particular faith have much to do with the validity of its cosmology. One can assess the value of social rules like no murder, no stealing, no bearing-of-false-witness, etc without even really needing to look at any given faith's creation myth, or theology, or eschatology. I find claims concerning transubstantiation* or Christology to be non-starters, but a goodly volume of Christian moral philosophy impresses me as positive in its influence (of course most if not all of that moral philosophy is essentially shared with if not lifted directly from other religions...)



* of course any right-thinking person knows that consubstantiation is where it's at...

[Alerik the Fortunate]

The issue with plurality of Christian sects lessening the probability of any of them being right is that they all claim to belief in the same source text, which promises mechanisms: the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the authority of the True Church, whatever, that claim to offer guarantees that their fundamental beliefs will never lead them into errors of interpretation, at least not serious ones. Yet they must then either accuse each other of lying about whether they believe in the truth of the Bible so that those mechanisms don't work, or provide some sort of proof that one of those groups actually possesses those powers, and can demonstrate to outsiders that it operates reliably. Of course none of them can demonstrate these powers, so they just offer belief tests, like you can't be a real Christian unless you believe the following particular doctrines about Christ's divinity of the prophetic inspiration of the head of the church, thereby defining membership in their group as the test of real Christianity, and discounting the supernatural interpretive claims of other groups. Of course it's just circular reasoning and doesn't fool anyone outside of their group. They all do it to some degree or other because they have no real grounds to claim authority on anything. So all their bickering tends to undermine the claims of the text that they all claim to share in common.

Since atheists don't claim to share this mechanism, disagreement doesn't affect them as much. That said, scientists shouldn't disagree too much, or scientific methodology is meaningless. But science is only probabilistic, and makes no claims that anyone who "believes" in science should have any knowledge whatsoever, though those who practice it correctly should be better informed on average, and by a substantial amount. What one atheist says has no logical bearing on what another believes, because they don't necessarily have to have become atheists for the same reason. Aumann's Agreement Theorem implies that they should all agree, given that they are perfectly rational and have access to the same information, but neither condition really holds in real life.

[Count Chocula]

I tend to look on the Bible as a history and hagiography, compiled from prior records, hundreds of years after the events. Maybe thousands, millions or billions of years (In the Beginning, Was the Word...). Couple that to its translations from Aramaic into Greek, Latin, Olde English, Neu English, German, Spanish, etc. etc. etc. and it's a pretty reasonable supposition that errors crept into the various texts. Then you have the Old and New Testaments, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the chapters that weren't included in the Bible, the different versions, etc. etc. etc. and the lack of knowledge of natural laws and events, plus quite probable misinterpretations of events by eyewitnesses, and it becomes pretty undeniable that ANY holy book we read today has strayed from its roots to some extent. Some faiths' holy books are based on no or few written records and are transliterations of oral histories. More room for error.

Then, of course, you have the reality of every church hierarchy being populated by fallible humans, with all of our flaws no matter how much we may wish to lead the supposed "godly" life, and whodathunkit more possibility for error creeps into the picture.

I'll use Catholicism as an example; I, and most of my mates growing up, read the Bible in whole or in part, including Leviticus. The Pope knows those passages as well. But our attitude that it's a difference of behavior or genetics or whatever and a burden does not mean we treat homosexuals like witches. That's also why a majority of us accept that the theory of evolution is the method of explaining our presence on this ball that stands up best to scrutiny. Is it possible that there's "intelligent design" behind our presence here? Sure there is, but there's no proof, which is why in (at least my) Catholic school it was taught in Religion class, not science.

Christian faiths, sects, cults, what have you, all start from the same basic template and offer up different interpretations that appeal to different people. Vive la difference, as long as it doesn't lead to violence over what the words in a many-translated book mean.

[Prannon]

In my experience, also, there is a very fine line between hating the sin and hating the sinner. For many of the unthinking Christians out there, they will profess the idea of hating the sin and not hating the sinner, but will not realize when they're crossing that fine line. For homosexuals in particular, it is an unpleasant shock to find a friend who doesn't accept your lifestyle choices. On a friend-level, it prevents a respectful, balanced, and healthy relationship from developing.

That, and it kinda follows that: Homosexuality is a sin --> Hate the sin, but not the sinner --> The sinner must be redeemed and turned away from their sin, and brought to the love of Jesus Christ. And we all know what manner of discriminatory and cruel policy that sort of logic produces.

No, I don't think that line of logic is healthy at all. If a person thinks that it's wrong behavior, then they don't have to engage in it and they shouldn't force themselves on anyone else.

[Kanastrous]

For homosexuals in particular, it is an unpleasant shock to find a friend who doesn't accept your lifestyle choices.

aaaaaaaaaand there's a big part of the problem, right there.

"Lifestyle choices."

[Count Chocula]

I shall counter: "Free Will." I'm not gay, not my choice or preference, but I have friends and acquaintances who are. They don't make passes at me, and I don't try to change them. Win win.

[Prannon]

aaaaaaaaaand there's a big part of the problem, right there.

"Lifestyle choices."

Pretty much. A choice to be undone, or so many Christians would see it.

[Batman]

I positively fail to see why it matters either way. Either you're biologically hardwired to be gay-so you're gay. I fail to see the problem. Or you actually chose to be gay, which, while I won't pretend to understand it, is frankly none of my business. You're gay. Net harm done to society=zero. Why am I required to think that gay=evil again?

[Prannon]

For the record, I do not think that it is possible to hate the sin and not hate the sinner. I agree with the person who earlier said that it's a case of modern doublethink. It's too easy to follow that train of logic from hating the sin to acting in a discriminatory manner to gay people while thinking that you're loving them.

[Simon_Jester]

For the record, I do not think that it is possible to hate the sin and not hate the sinner.

I think it is possible. Consider the following lines- not just in the context of homosexuality, but in the context of practices you personally disapprove of and think no one should do.

"It's breaking my heart watching you do this to yourself."
"You're better than this."
"I hope you can find the strength to quit _______."

This kind of thing may strike you as condescending or whatever, but it's not incoherent.

I can think smoking is a really stupid and destructive habit that will knock years off your life, without hating people who smoke. I can think being habitually rude is a terrible habit, and yet love a person who is habitually rude. The capability exists- we can be generous and tolerant about other people's perceived failings. And there are good reasons to do so: it's a better way to reach out to them, it keeps us from becoming too stupidly hypocritical about failing to perceive our own faults while condemning those of others, and so on.

In general, and this is not just a new idea invented to be applied to homosexuality, "hate the sin, love the sinner" comes out of the idea that you always ought to be this way about everyone. That instead of saying "fuck you" and ostracising a person who does bad things, you should keep trying to reach out to them, to bring out their strengths and help them overcome their weaknesses, to rehabilitate them.

It's a positive impulse, really, and one our world would be colder without.

The problem comes in the definition of "sin," and what happens when acts which are not inherently wrong get retroactively defined as sin.

[open_sketchbook]

There was a post on spacebattles that replies to this better than I ever could. LordofHosts was trying the "hate the sin, not the sinner" line, and Aleph here laid the smack down.

And sorry if this all sounds like preaching. In a way I suppose it is. But Im not intending to sermonize and convert people here in any conscious way. Just trying to explain my own feelings. And if possible, show Im not just some hateful monster that wants to torment and persecute people I dont like and goes looking for excuses for doing so in some dusty old book I dont really believe in.

And that’s the thing. I don’t for a moment think that you’re an inherently hateful monster. I don’t think anyone is like that, frankly. You’re not looking in a dusty old book for justifications to spread bile, no.

But what you are doing is letting a dusty old book do your thinking for you. And you can’t deny that, because you’ve said it yourself, you have no reason beyond your religious faith to oppose homosexuality. None whatsoever. The entire basis of your argument is “the Bible says so”. The little bit of your brain that critically evaluates things, and thinks “okay, I’ll make a decision on this”… you’ve switched it off. Consciously, deliberately decided not to think, and allowed something else to set your reaction.

I cannot imagine why. Literally. I can’t imagine why you would do that. Giving up control in play, yes - though I won’t go any further there, as I’m verging on TMI - but allowing someone, something else to control how you think… I am at a complete loss to understand the behaviour you appear to find laudable. And honestly, it’s frightening. Because if you’re really, honestly serious about that - if you’re saying that you believe the Bible in its entirity, and allow it to set your morality as an absolute source of truth, and that you’re not just picking and choosing the bits that you think are right based on a separate, internal morality that has nothing to do with the Bible and everything to do with you… if you’re seriously telling me that you follow the Bible as an absolute, and that you’ll change your moral views if someone can present a sound theological argument to support their interpretation, then I can only conclude that if you were shown, in a way that satisfied you, that the Bible said all gays should be brutally murdered by any loyal man of faith, that you would pick up a weapon and start killing.

That terrifies me. That is a horrifying notion, and I don’t even live in America, which is the main bastion of “loud” Christian faith. If one of my personal heroes expressed views that went against what I’ve decided, myself, using rationality and empathy and logic, to be moral… I would be disgusted, upset, and my admiration for them would take a sharp downturn. Indeed, this has happened, when Dawkins said… I forget exactly what, some point during that ridiculous affair where an innocent comment from Rebecca Watson blew up in her face. He dismissed the prejudice she was facing as trivial, and I lost an awful lot of respect for him as a result.

But… you seem to be saying that if you were shown that the Bible told you to kill, maim and slaughter, you’d do it. And you’d hold the belief that doing it was right, and good, and proper, just because it was in the Bible. You might say that God would never command you to do that, but that means that you’re not judging by his words. If there were truly no moral differences between actions save for what God decrees, then nothing would stop him from declaring it right and proper to murder, lie, cheat and steal. By saying that he wouldn’t do that, you’re saying that there’s a separate axis of morality that he is following, and that he’s not the source of what is right and wrong, good and evil, righteous and sinful.

That’s my main problem with you, and people like you. No, I don’t think you’re inherently hateful. I don’t think that you’re born as twisted monsters who gleefully tell me that I’m going to be tortured for the rest of eternity for something that I don’t want to change, and which hurts nobody, and which brings me happiness. But when you give control over how you act to a book written thousands of years ago, by a far less enlightened and advanced culture, when you stop thinking and let something else point your brain in the direction it states, with no regard for situational context or plain logic… it makes you come out with some of the most horrible sentiments I’ve ever seen, once you strip away the surface layer of platitudes and excuses.

Because when religious people say that they’ll pray for me, that they want me to be saved, that they wish I could know the Lord like they do? You know what I hear?

I hear them silently imagining a future for me. A future where I’m happily heterosexual, and probably married to a nice man with 2.4 children and a detached house in the suburbs. A future where I do have a job, because times have moved on and women aren’t expected to remain in the kitchen anymore - except by the most rabid groups, who wouldn’t even say they’ll pray for me - but not a job that helps the LGBTQ community, or any other group they don’t like. A future where I go to church every Sunday, and sing hymns to Jesus, and teach my children that God created everything, with no explanation of how, or why, and definitely no teaching them to always, always, always question, learn, explore, root out pieces of the explanation that don’t quite fit and lever them open to find out why. After all, you’re not allowed to question faith. You’re not allowed to change it. It stays as it is, and any holes in the story are there because we don’t understand God, and never can, and shouldn’t try. They’re imagining, essentially, a future where I cook for my husband and kids, get married in church, don’t have any sex before marriage, baptise my children and live out my life piously and modestly.

And the thing is? The slight problem with that?

That’s not me. That’s some freaky doppelganger of me, using my body, mouthing words I would rail against with my lips, my mouth, my voice. That’s someone, something, that goes completely against everything that is the core of me, that lacks all the most important things that make me me. In every way that matters, in every way my friends and family know me, that person is not me.

What people are saying, when they say that to me, is that they want me to be saved, to know the Lord, to understand faith like they do, to experience the wonder of a personal revelation.

But what they really mean, underneath all of the excuses and saccharine platitudes, is that they want me to die.

[Prannon]

I think it is possible. Consider the following lines- not just in the context of homosexuality, but in the context of practices you personally disapprove of and think no one should do.

"It's breaking my heart watching you do this to yourself."
"You're better than this."
"I hope you can find the strength to quit _______."

This kind of thing may strike you as condescending or whatever, but it's not incoherent.

I can think smoking is a really stupid and destructive habit that will knock years off your life, without hating people who smoke. I can think being habitually rude is a terrible habit, and yet love a person who is habitually rude. The capability exists- we can be generous and tolerant about other people's perceived failings. And there are good reasons to do so: it's a better way to reach out to them, it keeps us from becoming too stupidly hypocritical about failing to perceive our own faults while condemning those of others, and so on.

In general, and this is not just a new idea invented to be applied to homosexuality, "hate the sin, love the sinner" comes out of the idea that you always ought to be this way about everyone. That instead of saying "fuck you" and ostracising a person who does bad things, you should keep trying to reach out to them, to bring out their strengths and help them overcome their weaknesses, to rehabilitate them.

It's a positive impulse, really, and one our world would be colder without.

The problem comes in the definition of "sin," and what happens when acts which are not inherently wrong get retroactively defined as sin.

Fair point, and one I can understand given that I work with pleasant people who smoke each day of my life. These are people that I like, and they do something that I find really nasty, like you said.

I suppose it depends on what the "sin" is that you're hating. I'm sure we'll agree that there are worlds of difference between smoking, which is universally accepted to be bad for you, and homosexuality which, while most people don't think it's wrong and know that it's either biologically wired or completely none of their business to decide, some people believe is an offense against their god. Taken to that extreme, hating the sin while loving the sinner is very condescending indeed, because it goes back and assumes that their sexuality is wrong when around 60-70% of people won't have any problem with it. That, and the discriminatory policies that arise out of that.

So, I'd say that this ethical-theological philosophy, applied to this particular issue, is a misapplication at best.

[Simon_Jester]

Fair point, and one I can understand given that I work with pleasant people who smoke each day of my life. These are people that I like, and they do something that I find really nasty, like you said.

Well, to me, they do something foolish, not nasty; nasty is when you're primarily poisoning others, not yourself.

But I don't get self-righteous and judgmental about the fact that other people are being foolish.

I suppose it depends on what the "sin" is that you're hating. I'm sure we'll agree that there are worlds of difference between smoking, which is universally accepted to be bad for you, and homosexuality which, while most people don't think it's wrong and know that it's either biologically wired or completely none of their business to decide, some people believe is an offense against their god. Taken to that extreme, hating the sin while loving the sinner is very condescending indeed, because it goes back and assumes that their sexuality is wrong when around 60-70% of people won't have any problem with it. That, and the discriminatory policies that arise out of that.

So, I'd say that this ethical-theological philosophy, applied to this particular issue, is a misapplication at best.

You probably know this, but I want to remind you: official hostility to homosexuality was pretty much universal fifty years ago- and not just in the US, but in the Western world in general and in much (perhaps not all) of the rest. There were exceptions, unofficial acceptance of things that officially Must Not Happen, and a thick layer of hypocrisy slathered over it all... but by and large, the idea that "sodomites" could be socially accepted was just not in the cards, and the same went for female homosexuality.

Things have changed a lot since then, but majority acceptance of homosexuality in the sense that "you have a right to do this and it doesn't count as 'corrupting the children' or some other nebulous crime that boils down to 'you ignore the way we expect society to work' is probably only twenty or thirty years old.

I don't think a lot of people's brains have caught up yet, and I have a hard time compelling myself to hate them on those terms, until "they haven't caught up with the times" starts translating into "they hurt people." There are a lot of ways someone like that can hurt people, mind you, so it's not like that's a rare exception.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Most people's brains haven't caught up yet because most people don't really use them that way. The other major problem is that homosexuality isn't a universal temptation. We understand and sympathize with people who eat too many sweets, drink too much, go chasing futilely over too many attractive members of the opposite sex, and dozens of other things that society permits in moderation and most people are tempted to do. But society says the acceptable amount of gay sex is zero, and the since the temptation isn't universal, it automatically creates a class of Other for those who are tempted by it. This invokes tons of powerful in-group, out-group discrimination mechanisms endemic to the human brain, that tend to blur the edges of "hate the sin, love the sinner" into a general distaste. Plus, the general conservative reaction to any perceived fault is to criminalize it and make the punishments grievous, for "deterrence." This just drives a rift between gay and straight societies, which begin to feel, mutually, that they cannot risk exposure to each other.

[Darth Lucifer]

Someone else on this board once said "Hating the sin IS hating the sinner when that sin is an inherent part of that person." And I totally agree with this.

This whole "Love the sinner, hate the sin" BS is the Christian version of having one's cake and eating it too. It's their way of reconciling their hatred and bigotry with the tenets of the religion whose message they claim to follow.

[Simon_Jester]

Darth, it's not new. "Love the sinner, hate the sin" isn't something that obnoxious evangelists dreamed up when gay rights showed up on the scene. Nineteenth century temperance advocates were saying it about alcoholics. Heck, Augustine of Hippo was saying it.

Now, as applied to you by people who refuse to accept your existence on your own terms, it's horrendously obnoxious and potentially very hurtful. But please try to understand that it is more, and has more of a history, than "quick, we need an excuse to keep up with the gay-bashing."

[Feil]

Doublepost: Another thing. If we treat this fairly, Simon, rather than dishonestly ignoring atheism, we would have to conclude that atheism is more likely to be false as well, because it too is incompatible with all of the others.

Simon's misconstructing the argument a little, I think, but, properly expressed, it does favor atheism. It runs like this:

In the absence of evidence for or against any claim, the probability of any particular claim being correct equals to the sum of probabilities of all possible divided by the number of possible claims.

Nonexistence is the default conclusion to the statement, "does X exist?" If you doubt this, ask yourself if there is a dinosaur in your backyard. Your default conclusion should be "No," until evidence demonstrates otherwise. So the probability of any given thing not existing is always equal to 1 minus the probability that it does exist.

The question of theism or atheism is not, "Which religious philosophy is right," but, "Does God exist?" and it can therefore be evaluated in this way.

Suppose that the evidence available generates a certain probability that God exists. Call this probability P(G). It doesn't matter for the purposes of this argument what that probability is, it works the same for 99.9% as for 0.1%. Suppose that a necessary property of God is exclusivity; that God is not God if there are two Gods.

Now, in the absence of evidence, suppose a claim to the following purpose: "God exists, has properties A, and exists exclusively, i.e. there are no other gods." Since this claim is not supported by evidence, there is nothing stopping anybody from making equivalent claims to exclusive gods with properties B, C, D, E, et cetera, all of them insisting that all the other possibilities are incorrect.

We can suppose an infinite number of possible properties for an exclusive God and attach each one to an exclusive claim. The sum of the probabilities of those claims is equal to P(G), and the number is infinite, so the probability of any specific one of them being correct tends to zero, since even though the probability that exactly one of the infinite number is correct equals P(G), we would have to pick an infinite number of them before we randomly found the correct one.

On the other hand, the probability that God does not exist is 1-P(G), which does not tend to zero.

The nonexistence conclusion is therefore inherently more likely to be correct than any one exclusive theist conclusion, or even any sum of exclusive theist conclusions, up to and including all exclusive theist conclusions that humanity has ever made, so long as there exists no evidence to support one specific exclusive theist conclusion against all the others, including possible alternatives that have not yet been invented. This is the case even if some evidence that does not support one specific exclusive theist conclusion proves that it is 99.99999% probable that God exists and exists exclusively. In such a case, theistic agnosticism would be the logical conclusion: "God exists, there is only one of him, but we don't know what his other properties are."

To reiterate: Any religion with claims to exclusivity but no evidence for why their exclusive God is real and all the other ones are fake has 0 probability of being true.

Note that for the purposes of this argument, the nonexistence conclusion would include any nonexclusive theist conclusion as well as atheism, since we defined God as something that has to be exclusive.

Obviously, if evidence exists to favor one, or a specific subset, then this argument doesn't apply to it. Examples of good evidence might include a booming voice from the heavens, saying, "I am God, the God of Abraham and Isaac, and as a demonstration of My holy power, for the next eight hours, all Geiger counters on Earth will spell out bible passages in Morse when they tick. All of you should be Roman Catholics. Thus says the LORD."

[Simon_Jester]

Good idea with the Geiger counters.

As presented, though, this argument has a flaw- because the probability of God not existing doesn't trend towards 1-P(G) when we specify that P(G) is the probability of any single religion being correct.

To take an example of this, suppose I tell you to guess the color of a shirt in my closet. You guess. Your probability of being right is P, your probability of being wrong is 1-P. Someone else makes a guess mutually exclusive with yours. Their probability of being right is P, their probability of being wrong is 1-P... but the probability of both of you being wrong is 1-2P.

If enough people guess, we will eventually fill up the entire space of possible colors of shirts; if my shirt is monochrome the probability of all of you being wrong is zero. Then we'd have to start in on the various possibilities of stripes and checked flannel...

So there are plenty of situations where having more people with mutually exclusive opinions increases the probability of one of them being right, even if it doesn't make any one of them more worth paying attention to than they would be anyway. You can't just say "P of any of you being right trends to zero, in addition to the P of any specific one of you being right already being tiny."


That was never my argument. My argument was more fuzzy, because it's about heuristics.

Call all hypothetical statements about what we think reality to be "guesses." They may be incredibly confident guesses ("The sun will rise tomorrow") or unlikely ones ("I will win the lottery tomorrow.") It doesn't matter.

There are two classes of guesses we can make. For simplicity's sake, call them educated and uneducated. An educated guess is one where we have some reliable mechanism for knowing sense from nonsense. This is important because when you think about it, there are an infinite number of possible answers for any question. An infinite number of which, it so happens, are gibberish.

For example, I could ask "what color is my shirt?" And you could answer "Jehoshaphat." That would be silly, since Jehoshaphat isn't a color at all, but you could say it. "Jehoshaphat" or "the volume integral of the square of the electric field" or some such might be a perfectly good answer to some other question. You can say it. Nothing stops you. It is part of the 'possible' answer space; it just isn't a part of the answer space that could ever be the correct answer to this question.

And if we look at the huge possible solution space for a given problem, we will find that far and away the majority of it is packed with 'gibberish' answers, which mean nothing and are useless for our purposes. There will be a much smaller set of answers that are non-gibberish, which might be right or wrong but are at least consistent with the rules of nature and logic. "My shirt is pink" may not be true, but it doesn't violate any fundamental principle of how the world works. "My shirt is the volume integral of the square of the electric field" does.


Now, when we make an educated guess, we have mechanisms in place for eliminating the gibberish answers. When you make an "educated" guess, you automatically discard all the downright impossible answers, and may even discard a subset of the possible-but-unlikely 'reasonable' answers. This leaves you with a narrow possible solution set.

With educated guesses, it can be possible for a large group of people to make mutually exclusive guesses and come up with the right answer by brute force. Because if they're all using sensible rules to eliminate the impossible and they're all combing through the same limited space of the possible, they just might be able to fill up the solution space by sheer numbers. They might guess every possible color of my shirt, in which case one of them has to be right.

But with uneducated guesses, all bets are off. The uneducated guesser has no way to tell fact from fiction, or plausibility from gibberish. Each answer of his is, in effect, a fishing line cast into the infinite sea of possible answers... which contains only a finite number of fish.

It doesn't take a genius to predict that he can fish for a long time without catching anything that way. Indeed, a horde of like-minded guessers could all be fishing like madmen and never find anything, because they're looking for a finite target in an infinite background space.


The reason why I think there's actually some sense to the "South Park" argument that a horde of mutually exclusive guessers are likely to all be wrong is because when you have that many people coming up with mutually exclusive answers, it calls into doubt whether they're making educated guesses.

If we ask a horde of educated guessers what color the shirt in my closet is, sooner or later they'll start duplicating answers, particularly obvious ones like "white" and "green" and "blue." This is because there are only so many answers that are likely to be true, and normal educated-guess methods let us rule out most of the alternatives. They're all being reasonable, and there are only so many ways to be reasonable, so the reasonable people will tend to cluster toward those possible ways.

But if we ask a horde of uneducated guessers about the color of my shirt, it's very unlikely that they'll ever duplicate an answer. Because they're probing a much larger solution space, and can't tell which bits of it might actually contain what they're looking for. They might guess "green," but they might just as well guess "unicorn" or "volume integral et cetera," or something else entirely.

(We can see that it would be very hard to find truly uneducated guessers about color. It's easier if we ask a more obscure question, say the sort of question to which "the volume integral of the square of the electric field strength" is an answer)


So one way you can tell between a crowd of logical-minded people who are all looking for an answer they have some hope of finding and a crowd of babbling idiots is by looking at whether their answers tend to match up.

Suppose ten people are asked "what will be the weather tomorrow" and eight of them come up with closely similar versions of "cold and rainy." It seems likely that among those ten people are several who know what they're talking about. Maybe they have local experience of the weather, maybe common sense tells them it'll be cold and rainy in November where they live, maybe they're all meteorologists. It doesn't matter- the key is that they know something.

If ten people are asked "what will be the weather tomorrow" and come up with wildly different answers, you're within your rights to wonder if you're being tricked, or if don't know what they're talking about. By blind chance one of them might know, but if he's got it so right, why can't he present his argument to any of the other nine and convince them? Or at least convince them partially, point out that clearly it's not going to snow in July, and thus create a certain amount of compatibility between their answers. Or at least convince everyone that "fuzzy pink unicorns" is not an answer to the question and get Person #6 to stop saying it as if it were- same concept.


As applied to religion, if all we see is a vast, undifferentiated sea of fanatics who cannot be convinced to share any meaningful viewpoints in common... well, maybe we're looking at a bunch of bickering lunatics, not a bunch of educated guessers.

If there was a reliable method of coming to the truth, and any meaningful fraction of the people out there had it, you'd think that some of them would be using it and getting similar answers.

[Feil]

To take an example of this, suppose I tell you to guess the color of a shirt in my closet. You guess. Your probability of being right is P, your probability of being wrong is 1-P. Someone else makes a guess mutually exclusive with yours. Their probability of being right is P, their probability of being wrong is 1-P... but the probability of both of you being wrong is 1-2P.

I may have been insufficiently clear. To abuse your example, suppose that you have exactly one article of clothing in your closet, which may be a shirt or some other garment. A bunch of people guess that it is a shirt of some particular color, each one guessing a specific color by pointing at a color wheel, so that there are infinite possible guesses and P(Shirt&Color) is the probability of any specific guess that it is a shirt of a particular color is correct. The probability that all of them are incorrect goes as 1-n*P(Shirt&Color), as you have predicted. As n goes to infinity, where all the possible colors are being chosen, n*P(Shirt&Color) tends to P(Shirt) and 1-P(Shirt) is the probability that all of them are wrong. Clearly, as n goes to infinity, P(Shirt&Color) goes to 0, although P(Shirt) is constant and n*P(Shirt&Color) tends to P(Shirt) as n goes to infinity. Because we haven't done anything to the selection set, this means that P(Shirt&Color) was always zero, and n*p(Shirt&Color) is also zero, except in the limiting case as n goes to infinity.

[Channel72]

As applied to religion, if all we see is a vast, undifferentiated sea of fanatics who cannot be convinced to share any meaningful viewpoints in common... well, maybe we're looking at a bunch of bickering lunatics, not a bunch of educated guessers.

If there was a reliable method of coming to the truth, and any meaningful fraction of the people out there had it, you'd think that some of them would be using it and getting similar answers.

As applied to religion, I can easily imagine a religious apologist arguing that people out there are getting similar answers. Yes, human history is littered with countless incompatible faith systems, including endless forms of animism, polytheism, mysticism, monotheism, etc. But the majority of humans have been polytheists or Abrahamic monotheists, and only monotheism is necessarily exclusivist.

Not all polytheistic systems are exclusivist; for example, ancient Greeks traveling to other parts of the world tended to identify local deities with their Greek counterpart. Even monotheism has mechanisms to incorporate polytheistic frameworks without outright saying polytheists are delusional lunatics. For example, Christian, Jewish and Islamic tradition identify pagan gods as real demonic entities which are subordinate to the One True God™. And even the competing monotheistic faiths are only partially exclusionary: yes, if Christianity is true then Islam isn't 100% true, but it's similar enough to Christianity/Judaism to say that these religions "share meaningful viewpoints in common".

In other words, the majority of the world's religious adherents aren't necessarily spouting out random incompatible ideas; there's a significant overlap.

[Simon_Jester]

To take an example of this, suppose I tell you to guess the color of a shirt in my closet. You guess. Your probability of being right is P, your probability of being wrong is 1-P. Someone else makes a guess mutually exclusive with yours. Their probability of being right is P, their probability of being wrong is 1-P... but the probability of both of you being wrong is 1-2P.

I may have been insufficiently clear. To abuse your example, suppose that you have exactly one article of clothing in your closet, which may be a shirt or some other garment. A bunch of people guess that it is a shirt of some particular color, each one guessing a specific color by pointing at a color wheel, so that there are infinite possible guesses and P(Shirt&Color) is the probability of any specific guess that it is a shirt of a particular color is correct. The probability that all of them are incorrect goes as 1-n*P(Shirt&Color), as you have predicted. As n goes to infinity, where all the possible colors are being chosen, n*P(Shirt&Color) tends to P(Shirt) and 1-P(Shirt) is the probability that all of them are wrong. Clearly, as n goes to infinity, P(Shirt&Color) goes to 0, although P(Shirt) is constant and n*P(Shirt&Color) tends to P(Shirt) as n goes to infinity. Because we haven't done anything to the selection set, this means that P(Shirt&Color) was always zero, and n*p(Shirt&Color) is also zero, except in the limiting case as n goes to infinity.

Sorry, yes, I accept that you're more familiar with probability theory than I implied in my previous post... so, what do you think of the rest of my argument?

Short form, that if the "South Park argument" is being used intelligently and seriously, it isn't really about probability, it's about the quality of heuristic being used by the guesser.

As applied to religion, I can easily imagine a religious apologist arguing that people out there are getting similar answers. Yes, human history is littered with countless incompatible faith systems, including endless forms of animism, polytheism, mysticism, monotheism, etc. But the majority of humans have been polytheists or Abrahamic monotheists, and only monotheism is necessarily exclusivist.

Not all polytheistic systems are exclusivist; for example, ancient Greeks traveling to other parts of the world tended to identify local deities with their Greek counterpart. Even monotheism has mechanisms to incorporate polytheistic frameworks without outright saying polytheists are delusional lunatics. For example, Christian, Jewish and Islamic tradition identify pagan gods as real demonic entities which are subordinate to the One True God™. And even the competing monotheistic faiths are only partially exclusionary: yes, if Christianity is true then Islam isn't 100% true, but it's similar enough to Christianity/Judaism to say that these religions "share meaningful viewpoints in common".

In other words, the majority of the world's religious adherents aren't necessarily spouting out random incompatible ideas; there's a significant overlap.

I don't actually disagree with any of this.

I got into this in the first place in defense of a logical proposition- that confronted with a bunch of people who all denounce all other members of the group as wrong, the odds that they're a pack of bickering madmen whose only hope of finding truth is to trip over it while wandering around blindly go up, finally approaching 100%.

The chief defense of religions against the argument is indeed that of syncretism- that many religions are not mutually exclusive, or necessarily superior or inferior to each other. Personally I find a good deal to admire in most syncretic faiths, as they tend to be more benevolent and tolerant than their parents,

[ComradeClaus]

how many christians look at homosexuality as a 'mental illness' to be 'cured' rather than a 'sin' to be 'punished'? since it can't be proven god exists, thus punishment for sins cannot, whereas disease HAS been proven to exist & cures for some have been found.

example: anne heche was straight for years, but upon meeting ellen degeneres became gay [brain chemistry change from strong emotion?], but eventualy became straight again.

sexuality is decided by brain structure/function: fact

brain structure can be changed tenmporarily/permanetly by drugs/etc.=fact

a doctor w/ christian leanings could argue that gays/transgender could be 'cured' by mind altering drugs, like an adhd patient [or an atheist ], using the above logic.

of course, that argument is wrong, but christians/ republicans never let facts interfere w/ their goals

[Feil]

Short form, that if the "South Park argument" is being used intelligently and seriously, it isn't really about probability, it's about the quality of heuristic being used by the guesser.

I agree with you in general - hence why I phrased the probabilistic argument as an amendment to your argument, not as an opposition. The keyphrase in your post about the shirts and the weather was, in my view, "calls into doubt whether they're making educated guesses."

If the guesses are based on demonstrable evidence, then they don't follow equiprobable distributions with all other possible guesses anymore, allowing one to have nonzero probabilities for classes (although not for truly specific items) even with an infinite number of possible choices. To follow your weather example, it is possible to predict with 80% certainty that it will rain between 2 and 3 centimeters tomorrow, even though one could conceive an infinite quantity of rainfall, rain that simply never stops for the entire future of the world, so 2-3 centimeters would be, in the absence of all evidence, 0% probable, because we have evidence that positions 2-3cm at the the peak of an asymptotically decaying probability curve that tends rapidly to zero once you get very far outside 2-3cm. This, in essence, is the counter to the golden mean / southpark argument.

Of course, the probability that it will rain exactly 2*sqrt(2) cm of rain is 0 for reasons described in my earlier posts.

Be careful when assuming that consensus implies evidence, however. That a number of people have reached a consensus on something is evidence that they have a good reason to believe it, but not that they are correct. People are remarkably bad at logical thought, and even those of us who practice it as part of our daily lives and workplaces are perpetually realizing that there are areas of our life in which our actions and beliefs are determined by nothing but impulses, feelings, and non-logic-based pattern recognition. Consensus it more likely that they are correct, because being correct is one of the common reasons why people reach consensus; but once you have examined the reasons for consensus, the fact of their consensus is irrelevant: if you had discovered that they reached consensus because they were correct, you would immediately discard whatever probability that they were incorrect that you had allowed when you observed their consensus initially. Regardless of the reasons or their probability of correctness, you should immediately discard whatever probability that they were correct or incorrect that you ascribed to their consensus, instead using their reasons and only their reasons to determine your judgment. Appeal to popularity is not the solution to the golden mean fallacy.