From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Nov 04 1999 - 20:36:56 MST
John Clark wrote:
>
> Cynthia <cyn386@flash.net> On November 03, 1999 Wrote:
>
> > I don't understand what is wrong about saying that we are all sinners???
>
> If ALL people have this property, being a sinner, then there is no contrast.
> If there is no contrast then the statement has exactly the same meaning
> as "all people are saints", and that is no meaning at all.
Oh, give me a break. Are you saying the statements "All people are made
of atoms" or "All atoms obey the laws of physics" are not meaningful? I
think you're objecting to the fact that "sin" lacks a clear definition,
which has nothing to do with the generality or lack thereof. After all,
all tangerines are not sinners, so "sin" is less general than "atomic substrate".
> To be honest there is another even more important reason I would never
> use the phrase "we are all sinners", it makes me sound like a hillbilly.
And why? Because "sin" has not been clearly defined except as
"something you should feel guilty about", making it a statement with
emotional value but almost no logical value.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:43 MST