Nice One
26 July 2005 by BobJust gotta love the Brit media when it comes to religion. Check out a great phrase in a commentary piece from The Guardian concerning the religious freaks who bombed the tube:
All religions are prone to it, given the right circumstances. How could those who preach the absolute revealed truth of every word of a primitive book not be prone to insanity?
Nice. Go read the full commentary here.
26 July 2005, on 10:09 am
We’re not really sure why, but the topic of conversation between my wife and I often (at least three or four times a week) takes the following turn: How can a smart, savvy, edcucated person take a fundamentalist approach to religion? We are both more-or-less atheists, so on some base level, we really don’t understand how anyone could really be religious at all, but we’re willing to give some people the benefit of the doubt, as long as they strive to be continually progressive in their religious views. It looks like my family would be much more at home across the pond than right here in the buckle of the Bible belt where we currently live. . . .
26 July 2005, on 10:50 am
W. Joel Brooks, you hit the bullseye.
It makes sense that an uneducated person is more likely to hold non-rational, non-modern, non-scientific beliefs, because the process of modern education is about (or at least should be about) constraining beliefs with evidence, likelihood, logic, facts about human nature (ability to be wrong, lying, belief as oppression, etc), mechanistic explanations, scientific method, etc–and such a person hasn’t the benefit of this training and exposure. It would seem that striving to provide education to as many people as we can would help reduce “rogue believing”. But…
…your point about the smart and educated fundamentalists remains, and this I think is the more important issue. Even in affluent advanced societies there are rogue believers of all sorts. Sure, some are demonstrably mentally ill but just as many non-rational believers are, in all other respects, cognitively competent*.
I submit that understanding this disconnection between normal or high intelligence/competence and irrational belief is one of the keystones to a vision of rational societies where the incidence of such rogue believers (and their detrimental actions) is much rarer than it is today. Opinions?
(*perhaps our general sense of what “cognitively competent” means needs a major overhaul? Could this be part of the explanation?)
26 July 2005, on 10:50 am
…but we’re willing to give some people the benefit of the doubt, as long as they strive to be continually progressive in their religious views. — I guess you could also say that my wife and I sort of feel the same way, although I’d phrase it differently: I’m tolerant of religious people so long as they don’t take their religion too seriously or have intellectual integrity for the stuff that’s stupid. If they say something like, “Yeah, I know it’s dumb, but I’m scared off my ass about hell,” then I’m, like, hey okay, you said it, now pass the booze and let’s have a good time. But if things turn politically ugly (i.e., gay rights, abortion), then I’d have to say that I have little tolerance for religious people in that way.
27 July 2005, on 9:45 am
I think this points to an interesting facet of postmodernity–the idea that part of the postmodern condition is being fractured or splintered. Instead of being singular entites, composed of a wholly self-contained a soul/spirit/mind, we are comprised of a random, disparate, often conflicting mixture of experiences, attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, and opinions. Another way I’ve heard it put is that in the postmodern condition, we are all necessarily schizophrenic to a degree. That helps me come closer to understanding our educated, intelligent compatriates who also happen to be fundamentalists.
28 July 2005, on 10:25 am
I also have always wondered about extremely intelligent people who are also fundamentally religious. People still swear they have seen Elvis alive and well, and he only died 28 years ago - it’s commonly agreed these people are nuts, or just severely mistaken. YEt when someone reads a two-thousand year old book written by people who swear that they saw Jesus come back from the grave, it all makes perfect sense, and they’re not willing to ascribe it to other causes (eg a two thousand year old game of “telephone” - and ongoing!)
I think humans are especially good at compartmentalizing their mind and hiding from the grim rational truth. Just think about people in relationships who “don’t know” that the other party is either miserable or cheating or whatever, when it’s pretty obvious. Or parents who don’t know that their kid is ugly. Just kidding on that last one. Sort of.
28 July 2005, on 10:48 am
Just read it, and that’s an excellent article, by the way. I love it when people actually have the guts to say stuff like that.
28 July 2005, on 12:25 pm
You know, for the already-converted, the scientific materialist view of existence sits well in our minds. But it might be helpful to think about what an irrational theist gets when he/she trades in theist beliefs for scientific materialist/atheist ones. The tale we’re selling goes like this:
Theist: [earnestly] So what’s the big picture? What’s it all about? What’s the meaning of life? What is my purpse and role in the universe? What is the point of all this?
Materialist: We materialists don’t speak in terms of “meaning” and the “point” of it all. But the facts of the universe are this: an infinitely hot, infinitely small speck of matter rapidly expanded one day–and we have no idea why or how it got there–exploding with unimaginable energy. It didn’t explode into space, but it’s explosion created space. And time, by the way. The interactions of unimaginably tiny specks of matter-energy over 10 billion years brought us to our present state of affairs. To understand more beyond that will require you taking classes, maybe for years.
Theist: Yes, but what about ME? What about my life? My death?
Materialist: You are a collocation of such particles. Your life as a process can be partially explained in the aforementioned classes. Beyond that, your life as a person is more complex than our science is ready to address in 2005, though we have people working on the problem. Your death is easier: your biological process and personhood will just simply cease, permanently.
I could go on and on here, but I’ll leave it there. I’d suggest that for many “sensible” theists, this belief trade is, to their minds, a bum deal. They trade surety, a sense of protection and care, a sense of grand meaning, for the need for years of study all directed towards an end in which there is no overseer or humanistic sense to any of this. I know belief shouldn’t be yoked to preference or palatableness, but it appears that it is. Why do materialists then adopt such beliefs? For my own part I find I have simply no choice, I just believe what seems to be the most likely case (though theists will claim the same thing).
29 January 2007, on 5:06 am
It seems to me that those who don’t believe inGod are the ones who can’t give a ratioal explenation of how we got hear. So the scientist will say that The Big Bang is what started it all, yet cannot explain how the big bang came to happen. Well by a huge build up of matter and energy suddenly released in a cataclysmic explosion they say, but cannot explain where the matter or energy came from. Appaerntly it just appeared.
The truth is that that the argument for God lies in everyone of us, it’s His signature on His greatest masterpiece: Man.
Man was made in Gods image, that’s why we shudder at things that are considered evil. Ask an athiest where evil and good comes from. Latent expressions of emotions? Where did they come from? Everything has a creator, including Man, the earth and all that’s in the universe!!