Why? I hear that a lot, and it doesn’t seem based on anything but a desire to believe that people and ideologies are far nicer than they actually are. We live in a world with plenty of malice.
And sucking up to them does? Giving their claims false respect?
The purpose of assuming ignorance before malice (and I prefer to assume innocent mistakes before ignorance, if possible) is to avoid needless escalation of a confrontation, and perhaps to find a non-acrimonious solution.
I’ll give a personal example. My father is a Pentecostal minister, as I have posted here before. A while ago I started a thread about his, ah, ill-informed worries about me being tempted into homosexuality because I have gay friends. Now, I can assume that my father’s attitude on this subject comes from a malicious desire to control me; such is frequently the case with homophobes. OR I can assume that he is worried about the state of my soul out of love. Even though I don’t believe in souls–even though I don’t believe that God, if He existed, would give a good goddamn about who sleeps with whom–it’s better for the relationship to assume that ignorant affection rather than malice motivates my father. It enables me to deal with him without losing my temper; it helps me forgive him.
Likewise, when I meet someone other than Dad who espouses such dogma, it is more productive to assume that a lack of knowledge rather than a presence of hatred causes them to behave as they do. If I am wrong, I can adjust my dealings with such people accordingly. On hte other hand, if I assume a person acts distastefully out of malice when he is not, I am likely to become defensive, or even aggressive, which is not conducive to getting along with people well, or educating them…
I just want to say that in my experience, this is most definitely not the case.
I was born and raised Catholic, mass every Sunday and all the sacraments, the whole nine yards, and all my education up to 18 was under the auspices of the Catholic church.
In every single case I can think of, any trace or hint of critical thinking, intelligent enquiry or the posing of ‘awkward’ questions was very strongly and emphatically discouraged and in some cases even earned punishment. Blind, slavish, robotic and droning adherence to the One And Only Truth was encouraged and adopted as official policy at every relevant juncture.
If someone spends a very, very long time trying to tell me about a virgin that can give birth, messages revealed by angels, a man out in the desert somewhere having an actual conversation with The Devil, a Holy Spirit that appears as either a dove or ‘tongues of fire’ (?), dead people suddenly being alive again, and a piece of wafer that becomes not a symbol or a representation but the actual body and blood of someone from 2000 years ago, I’d find it hard to credit that person with much regard for intellectual strength.
Or, if you want a shorter and sweeter rebuttal, how about the act of declaring that under certain circumstances the Pope is speaking infallibly, an assertion that only means anything if the assertion itself is infallible… thereby leading to infinite regress. Yet it is official Church doctrine. So was the selling of indulgences, for a while.
I could go on and on, but I won’t.
Too bad you didn’t end up with my case–Catholic school from kindergarten up through my undergrad (at a Jesuit university), and it was my excellent schooling through all those years, including encouragement of “critical thinking, intelligent enquiry [and] the posing of ‘awkward’ questions,” that led me to move from Catholicism to atheism.
Same here. Well, depending on the teacher – some of them were pretty stuffy. But for the most part, they were pretty cool. And the Catholic college I went to was even more liberal – the head of the history department was a staunch believer in liberation theology.
And Der Trihs, for ONCE, would you kindly just LIGHTEN up? You’re becoming the Jerry Falwell of atheism.