Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

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My two cents on this off-topic discussion...

I've never been a part of the goin't'hell group, but in my fairly extensive experience as a young adult in an evangelical religious group, I certainly got the impression that the high touch personal approach was taken as more effective. Most people don't really like doing the door-to-door salesperson routine[0]. But they do it because it seems to work - assuming anyone actually answers the door (which is the real rarity). Or at least is effective enough; conversion rates are, shall we say, low. It doesn't need to be high, though, since the risk and reward is so high (failure means more lost, success is a life).

[0] For introverts it can be extremely stressful - practice is the only thing that seems to make the terror go away for them. If the person at the door preachin' the word looks awkward and is stammering, be kind - they're more afraid of you than you are of them :)

EDIT: slight grammar/clarification. EDIT EDIT: This is off-topic enough I'm going to just truncate part of my comment to gist: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/dead25324e4f74ccc183

> It doesn't need to be high, though, since the risk and reward is so high (failure means more lost, success is a life).

I think the risk:reward is often seen as higher than it should be even given the "going to hell" assumption, because the failure cost of the attempt is seen as capped at zero because alienation is not considered. This might make sense in a context where your particular door-to-door attempt was very likely to be the only exposure to Christianity that the target would ever have, but (since alienation of an unbeliever in that case would have the same effect as not making that particular door-to-door conversion attempt), but somewhat unlikely in the modern world.

Nicely put. This is exactly why there was (is?) quite a lot of effort in finding effective alternatives to the door-to-door method. There's still a lot of people who aren't modern (and the 'no person left behind' policy dictates that you'd continue to do door-to-door to sweep them up), but alternatives are needed.

In terms of moral introspection, I perceive a continuum of information quality from vague suspicion to almost complete certainty. Morally, I would have a very, very difficult time making life-changing affirmative moral arguments to complete strangers without almost complete certainty.

And, I could never, never ascribe almost complete certainty to a piece of information not complying with the vacuum intellect test (i.e. could an intelligent person not exposed to culture reasonably be expected to arrive at a similar conclusion, if given sufficient resources for independent experimentation).

So, quantum mechanics, as weird as it is, could pass the vacuum intellect test. Could I personally see a vacuum intellect reinventing the tenets of Christianity including the concept of hell? That seems completely implausible to me. Sure, one could argue divine intervention (again) -- but that violates the vacuum constraint.

So, question: By what moral thesis does one permit one's self to venture out into the world and attempt to convince other people to redirect their limited resources onto something which is not almost completely certain?

I was never a part of a group that believed in hell (hope that doesn't give me away...), so I can't speak for that.

But, if you relax the rigor and you're willing to settle for what you personally qualify as overwhelming circumstantial evidence, it's not too hard to meet that level of confidence (the Anthropic Principle is very powerful). These people are often True Believers.

It's a whole different mindset, and worth spending the effort to wrap your head around. I'd bet it's a sufficiently different frame of mind that you'll have a hard time relating. It's easy to just gloss it over as a fool's thinking, but it really can be quite complex and deep (after all, without that moral vacuum, there's a lot of core axioms to keep straight). And that's not bad; just be warned that it can be a bit of a memetic virus, but it's certainly not too hard to quarantine. Usually at a very low level there's an assumption made about the way things are, and enough evidence is brought in to make that assumption feel reasonable; that's not science but rather more of a judicial argument. If it feels a bit boot-strappy, you're a bit on track. Typically once the mindset is settled, that rationalizes the initial bootstrap; I think often those who preach worry that many will not be exposed to the needed bootstrap, and feel a moral imperative to help others through that process. And that's how you get the evangelism. (Clearly there's a gross amount of glossing over here :)

And it'll help a lot in pleasantly/tactfully dealing with such individuals. People are just folk, and most are sincere. Just not always as... rigorous as folk like yourself.

I agree. More layers of complexity than short term memory slots is a mandatory property of belief systems -- as more effort will be required to find the contradictions then is likely to be allocated.

And certainly handling such individuals with kid gloves is important to mitigate the intransigence reflex. I only ask because I wish to discover some more effective strategy to aid some of the more zealous individuals to improve their moral consistency. Fear is far more powerful than reason, however.

> If the person at the door preachin' the word looks awkward and is stammering, be kind - they're more afraid of you than you are of them :)

Wait a minute - so they don't like it, I don't like it... so why are we doing this?

It's the theological equivalent of "eat your vegetables". The link to Penn's commentary explains it reasonably well: no one wants to tackle another person, but you'd do it to stop someone from getting hit by a truck. Likewise, if you're sincere in thinking educating others of the theological risks can save their life - like you're not just going through the church-on-sunday motions, personal feelings take a back seat. To them it's too important to let petty things get in the way.

Naturally, this can backfire pretty hard. But that's the cost of taking the faith seriously.

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