[ExI] and speaking of exponential singularities...

[Damien Broderick]

On 7/18/2011 4:26 PM, Tom Nowell wrote:

> But there's an insidious group sending out young boys to try and steal my soul. They send out "elders" who look too young to shave out on to the streets in pairs. They seem to preferentially target white anglo-saxon types, and if you mention you're a christian they excitedly try to get you to read a book of a "bible" that doesn't look like any bible you've ever read. (Is it a sign you're approaching middle age when elders look incredibly young?)
>
> These people are the multi-level marketers of religion. They are the charity muggers of religion. They are the supermarket hustlers of religion. "would you like our free catalogue", "can you spare a minute for human rights across the world" , "can you spare two pounds a month for children in africa" , "have you heard of the book of mormon?"

There's also the quite incredible gullibility/stupidity of people who 
devote their lives to hokum that a child could show was concocted by a 
scammer (as with $cientology), since the fraudulence of the thing is a 
matter of fairly recent historical record.

Consider this charming episode reported by Christopher Hitchens in GOD 
IS NOT GREAT:

<In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a 
twenty-one-year-old man of being "a disorderly person and an impostor." 
That ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial 
admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging 
expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or "necromantic" 
powers. However, within four years he was back in the local newspapers 
(all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of the "Book of Mormon."

…Smith refused to show the golden plates to anybody, claiming that for 
other eyes to view them would mean death. But he encountered a problem 
that will be familiar to students of Islam. He was extremely glib and 
fluent as a debater and story-weaver, as many accounts attest. But he 
was illiterate, at least in the sense that while he could read a little, 
he could not write. A scribe was therefore necessary to take his 
inspired dictation. This scribe was at first his wife Emma and then, 
when more hands were necessary, a luckless neighbor named Martin Harris. 
Hearing Smith cite the words of Isaiah 29, verses 11-12, concerning the 
repeated injunction to "Read," Harris mortgaged his farm to help in the 
task and moved in with the Smiths. He sat on one side of a blanket hung 
across the kitchen, and Smith sat on the other with his translation 
stones, intoning through the blanket. As if to make this an even happier 
scene, Harris was warned that if he tried to glimpse the plates, or look 
at the prophet, he would be struck dead.

Mrs. Harris was having none of this, and was already furious with the 
fecklessness of her husband. She stole the first hundred and sixteen 
pages and challenged Smith to reproduce them, as presumably—given his 
power of revelation—he could. (Determined women like this appear far too 
seldom in the history of religion.) After a very bad few weeks, the 
ingenious Smith countered with another revelation. He could not 
replicate the original, which might be in the devil's hands by now and 
open to a "satanic verses" interpretation. But the all-foreseeing Lord 
had meanwhile furnished some smaller plates, indeed the very plates of 
Nephi, which told a fairly similar tale. With infinite labor, the 
translation was resumed, with new scriveners behind the blanket as 
occasion demanded, and when it was completed all the original golden 
plates were transported to heaven, where apparently they remain to this 
day. >

Good on Mrs. Harris, a woman with the elementary commonsense apparently 
denied the pests who upset Tom Nowell!

Damien Broderick