10 COMMANDMENTS OF RATIONALITY, (ONE THROUGH FIVE)
Note: I'm publishing this on a Sunday for a reason: Everyone KNOWS the Lord's Day is Saturday, so it would be blasphemous to publish it then. In your face, Biblical Literalist Christians!
(There, now do you see how annoying an arbitrary and unsubstantiated declaration can be?)
OK children, everybody take off your shoes from off your feet and get your asses up here onto my holy mountain. I'm going to give you number one through five of my Ten Commandments of Rationality. Chisels ready? OK, here goes:
In order to do this, you have to know the rules. I'm talking about informal logic here, not the "All men are mortal," syllogistic stuff. This isn't a math course. Just learn to recognize the basic logical fallacies, not only so you can pick them out of the arguments of others, but so you can avoid using them yourself. A good place to start learning is the Nizkor Project.
2. Thou shalt not hold thine opinions too tightly.
There's a podcast that I love, called the Princeton Review's LSAT Logic in Everyday Life. Every episode ends with the words, "First rule of LSAT logic: don't get emotionally involved with the subject matter." Excellent advice. It will keep you from losing perspective.
3. Thou shalt not fear to utter the words, "I don't know."
Only rigid dogmatists feel they need to have all the answers. The skeptic, the free thinker, the non-theist, should be content with a knowledge base that is more of a loose-leaf notebook than a stone tablet. Our knowledge is provisional and subject to review—everything we "know" is at best an approximation which we are constantly trying to improve. And the only way to improve that knowledge is to admit that what we thought before may not be true—that we don't know. (This will also protect you from falling into the logical fallacy of the false dichotomy, i.e. "if I am wrong, then the other guy must be right." Woo-woo thinkers operate under this false assumption all the time.)
4. Thou shalt be familiar with the magical writings of thine philosophical opponents, lest thou know not whereof thou speakest.
Christians read the Bible quite a lot. Moslems have the Koran. LDS have the Book of Mormon. If your day-to-day existence brings you into regular contact with these militant quoters of silliness, it is in your best interest to know when one of their mini-sermons is relying on an unsubstantiated claim or out-of-context citation. At the very least, western people should be familiar with the Bible. (The sad thing is that you will miss a lot of very fine language and poetry if you are only reading the Bible in self defense. Try to read it as literature too (The Fool recommends the KJV—for poetry, not for accuracy). You can't really understand the great works of Western lit. if you don't know the major characters and stories of the Bible.)
5. Thou shalt know thine opponents' weak points.
In the previous commandment I mention that Christians read the Bible a lot. But most of them don't read all of it—just selected portions. Most christians are weak on the Old Testament; they know the creation myth pretty well, but after about the third chapter of Genesis their knowledge starts to thin out a bit. Continuing into Exodus, they know the headlines (they can usually stumble through a recitation of the Ten Commandments), but they tend to miss the meat of the stories. By Leviticus their eyes have glazed over, and they've started looking at the last third of the book. . They might remember a few verses from Psalms or Proverbs, and the apocalyptically-minded have usually done a guided study of the book of Daniel, but in general, Christians don't favor the OT.
The New Testament, now, that's good stuff. Christians are always dragging out some quote or another to edify the unbeliever. The thing is, a lot of the NT makes direct reference to the OT, and more often than not, it gets the details wrong. The apostle Paul is known to misquote the Jewish Bible (thereby giving the lie to his claim to have studied with Rabban Gamliel in Jerusalem). The Gospels frequently make reference to some action of Jesus being done "that it may be fulfilled what was written in the [Jewish] scriptures...," though it is usually less than clear that a particular verse was meant to refer to future events. And a lot of citations of Jewish scripture show a surprising lack of knowledge of Hebrew language—in some cases getting the translation rather spectacularly wrong.
There are books about these misapplications of the Jewish Bible in Christian theology. I strongly recommend that everybody investigate them—Christians included. A good beginning is David Klinghoffer's Why the Jews Rejected Jesus.
Well, that's 1 through 5. Chisels down, everyone. Tune in next time for 6 through 10. Now get the hell off my mountain!
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