I would expect a reply along the lines of: It’s precisely because I can’t trust my own reasoning when deciding which false beliefs I should have that I accept these which are handed down. I pick Judaism because it’s the oldest and thus has shown through memetic competition that it’s the strongest set of false beliefs one could have.
Or …” I pick Christianity because it’s the most popular and has therefore proven itself memetically competitive.”
I have a lot of friends who think “it’s old therefore it must be good to have survived this long” about Tarot and eastern religions etc.
Personally I’d wanna eliminate the false beliefs even if it cost me my mojo, but that’s a different set of priorities I guess.
I don’t know really, certainly I can recall no specific incident. I suspect just the lessons in logic needed to learn to program computers properly, the basic lessons in the scientific method taught at school.
My folks are Christian, and I was still at Sunday School till I was about 14, but not really taking it seriously, still going just for the sake of a quiet life. By the time I was 18 at Uni I was certainly talking friends out of their theism, mostly by pointing out contradictions in their beliefs and challenging others to find some in mine. Then altering my beliefs when they occasionally found some.
Frankly my memory of my childhood is so appalling it’d be hard to have any confidence in a story if I told one.
Here we are nearly twenty years after that and drifting across a couple of OB posts from Eliezer through links elsewhere, probably during the QM series, maybe a bit before, led me to put OB into my RSS feed.
I’m always so far behind reading my RSS feed that feels like the discussion is over by the time I read anything there though, so never posted.
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