Are the odds really that crappy? (nice religious people)

Great Debates
1

even sven’s thread, and some of the initial responses, have rekindled something I’ve wondered for some time now.

The people on this board are fantastic. I couldn’t begin to express how much I enjoy everyone’s company, crusty posters and newbies alike. The people here are just fantastic.

And a consequence of this is that I genuinely believe much of what you all say. When a Christian (I won’t name names) says that all Christians aren’t bad, I believe them. I believe them for two reasons, actually. One is that “all” is a dangerous and silly generalization to apply to Christians (or any group of people). The other is that these posters are nice, and report that the people they associate with are also nice.

I’ve never been satisfied with metaphysical assertions. But that isn’t for lack of trying. Being an American, I am often subjected to Christians and Christianity. I’ve belonged to a church or five in my time, I’ve asked priests and pastors and assorted followers questions (not for an attempt at proof, lest anyone think I was being a smart-ass atheist), I’ve tried different faiths. I’ve met with assorted Jehova’s Witnesses (my favorite Christians, by the way), Baptists, Catholics, Mormons (sure I consider them Christian… why wouldn’t I?), born agains, and a few non denominationals. I own two bibles, the book of mormon, and several Watchtower books (not the height of Cecilism, it must be granted).

But what I can’t understand is why, given the ostensive teachings of these faiths, so many of the actual Christians I’ve met have been more or less close-minded jerks. I don’t know how else to say it, and this isn’t a rant so I’m trying to be honest and careful.

Surely a religion that is more or less based on caring and empathy should have, well, nicer followers? Nice, how? Well, like our fantastic Christian Dopers.

I… I just don’t get it.

So:

  1. Have non-christian posters found these experiences themselves; and,
  2. Any word from Christians why this might be the case?

Should (1) fail, I must concede unfortunate circumstances and leave it at that; I obviously can’t supply acceptable proof that these things have actually happened to me. But I’d still be interested in speculation on (2), assuming (1) is the case.

2

Now, now… I know quite a few Christians who are closed-minded nice people too.

I guess calling yourself a Christian isn’t going to neccessarily make you any nicer unless you really take your religion in the right spirit. Sometimes I wonder how nice you can be when your religion has some of the implications that Christianity does, yet I can still see that part in it that just wishes the best for everybody.

Problem is, to a Christian the non-believer is the one who seems uneccessarily closed-minded. And to the paranoid Christian; dangerously closed-minded.

3

There is a possibility that the “Christains” you are speaking of and also yourself when interacting with them are not restrained by the rules that we have to abide by here on the board. A Christain answering one of your questions here on the board has to realize that others will come along and bounce on him/her if those ideas become radical. Another advantage is that here on the board we can “preview” what we are going to say. Neither have I ever felt like a “man of God” was listening, ready to correct my response and if he existed, he would also be judged by the TMI. The long and short of it is that this is a means of expressing ourselves, which most of us thrive in. But it may not work for everyone.

4

It might be a selection problem. I mean, as of 1995, something like 85% of the population identifies as Christian, so it’s likely that many people you see and deal with are Christian. I don’t exactly know where I’m going with this, but I might suggest that you probably associate with more non-jerky Christians than you realize.

5

Honey, (I’m assuming you’re female. If not, substitute ‘Buddy,’) you need to join a local atheism/agnosticism/freethought group.
When your nerves recover, you will realize a fundamental truth: so many of the actual people you meet are close-minded jerks.

When dealing with obnoxious people of any shape, size, color, or flavor, just repeat under your breath, “Sagan, Gandhi, Polycarp. Sagan, Gandhi, Polycarp.” until the urge to stereotype passes.

6

In my own experience, there are more Christian jerks percentage wise. For example, a local Christian group refuses to hire any non-Christian (I know, I know, the anti-discrimination laws here suck). I have seen a whole lot of Christians badmouthing other religions and atheists.

7

Eris

I think it’s a matter of equivocation.

Let me caution you in advance that I’m not invoking a “No True Scotsman” here. I’m just saying that the word Christian can be used to mean many different things, all the way from genuine followers of the teachings of Christ down to the bottom of the barrel — tyrants who use Christ as a weapon of submission.

“Many are called, but few are chosen.” — Jesus

You’ve just met a lot of the many, but none of the few.

8

Most christians I met here aren’t jerks. The fact that people rarely talk about religion over here could play a part, but I would suspect that since french people aren’t very religious on the overall, religious people tend to keep a low profile. They aren’t going to throw their religion at your face since they’re very likely to be sent packing very quickly if they behave like jerks. It could also be the result of the long “war” between the catholics and secularists which lasted at least until the middle of the last century, and extended to every little village (a burial : half of the village would ostensibly wait in the local cafe during the religious ceremony, and the local teacher and the local priest would be the leaders of a permanent guerilla war pervasing any local issue). Perhaps at some point some sort of cease-fire came spontaneously into existence, and people decided to quit trying to force their religion/lack of religion down the throat of other people.
Hmmm…my point was that perhaps, the situation you describe in the US comes from the fact that american christians feel empowered and aren’t used to face a significant opposition to their beliefs, hence feel allowed to be jerks. That wouldn’t have much to do with religion per se (except for the fact there aren’t that many issues people feel strongly about) but with people having a tendancy to be jerks in general, as soon as they feel they’re in the stronger (and “good”) side.

9

There may be a selective sampling issue at work here.

If you go out looking for Christians, the first ones you spot will likely be the ones who self-identify most vocally as Christians. And it seems to be a rule of life that the louder people are about whatever they believe in, the more likely they are to be twits about it.

To take a non-religious example; if I turn on the news media around these parts, and see some politician talking about “British values” and “the traditions of the British people”, past experience suggests to me that he/she’s probably a racially bigoted right-wing loony, and none too bright besides. I don’t think these things are characteristic of the British in general (at least, I bloomin’ well hope not!), but they are characteristic of the people who make a fuss about being British. You see this in all sorts of areas. Obsessive sports fans, for instance.

10

My theory is that Overtly Christian people will more likely be jerks in the same way that overtly atheist people are more likely to be jerks. Unless you know the religious orientation of ALL your acquantences, its highly likely that you have quite a few nice Christians who dont broadcast the fact that they are Christian.

11

In essence, I agree with what Steve Wright and Shalmanese said: the really vocal Christians are the ones who are most likely to be jerks, because they’re the most likely to be radical. Same follows for the radicals of any particular group of people. I will say that my two best friends are fundamentalist Christian, and are very nice folks in general, and have no problems dealing with me, a person of a different faith. Perhaps they find some comfort in the fact that I worship God at all? I don’t know. Would they have more of a problem with me if I were an atheist? I’m thinking not, because my husband is, and they get along with him just fine. OTOH, there is a woman who lives in my neighborhood who just “found” Christianity, and she is obnoxious and hypocritical about it. She sits on her porch all day, throwing her cigarette butts on the sidewalk and using loud and offensive language, living with (but not married to) the father of her youngest child (her two older ones have two different fathers), and telling her youngest daughter that MY daughter is gonna burn in hell cuz we’re not Christians!! Go figure!

12

::looks around, finds all the comments he’d wished to make already made::

Why is it that every single Discordian I’ve spoken with, rather than being random, rude and irreverent, is instead thoughtful, respectful and quite disciplined in their thinking? I just don’t get it.

:wink:

13

While I’d agree with Steve and Shalmanese, I’d also toss out the theory that simply because there are more Christians here in America, that you will, by that fact, run into more of them. The more people you meet, the greater the odds that one or more of those people will be a jerk. Trust me, i’ve been in emergency services for 12 years (firefighter,cop,paramedic) if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the masses are asses, and they’ll prove that to you at every possible turn. :wally

It’s the people who take religion for the extremely private thing that it is, and don’t talk about it unless they are asked that pass under your radar. Much the same way that after you buy a small red car, you then realize how many small red cars there are.

Steve was right on as well with his take on the squeaky wheel theory, that I’d like to expound on just a bit. Christians make and lose a TON of money in the various sects of their religion. The ones that make money are the churches, and the ones that lose money, obviously, are the parishoners. (think government and citizens) I would be willing to wager that the ones that flap their soup coolers the loudest about being a Christian, (while being a jerk in the process) probably donate a tidy sum of their weekly pay to the church. They likely do so at the expense of other needs and desires, and by that donation feel entitled, (like a taxpayer) to freely harrass and harangue others because they “pay their taxes” which, I’ve found in several cases, the collection of said “taxes” to be just shy of coercion and harrassment . :rolleyes:

End of it all though, I don’t think that one can pigeon-hole an entire group, based on the interaction of a few members of that group, but I do think that you can infer that all members of that group have a POTENTIAL to be what you are catagorizing as a “jerk”.

14

Others have echoed this comment (or is it that this echoes others? ;)), but my problem isn’t that I would normally expect finding jerks to be normally distributed, it is that, by being Chrisitian, shouldn’t they be less jerky, even if they already were? Isn’t, say, being a pal part of following Christ? Every book I’ve read, person I’ve spoken to—they’ve summed it [Christianity] up in various ways, always pointing in this general direction: we’re not jerks. But telling themselves that doesn’t make it so. At least, from my experiences, it hasn’t.

I don’t think it is unfair to expect that any religion that has a “don’t be a jerk” rule as more or less the most common thing expressed about it should, in fact, have as many jerks as they do.

Bordering on the True Scotsman, Azael… how else can one actually take it?

Well, kniz… I do not consider myself a fragile person, but if it was only the board rules that held most of our Christian dopers back… well, I would lose faith in the board, and in my ability to estimate what people are like. As it stands, I can’t reconcile this possibility with the way I view the boards, and the people here on it. Of course, I’m not saying I am best buds with everyone, and if we met IRL we’d instantly get along and hang out all the time. There are more than a few that I’m sure I wouldn’t like in person… but it has nothing to do with the attitude that turned me away from Christianity again and again.

Captain Amazing, that is a possibility I never considered. I don’t know where to go with it, either, though… :wink: But that is really interesting. Like trying to find the dark matter in the universe, it might just be that a lot of the Christians simply aren’t forward, vocal, and so on, and so perhaps my methods (acting, as it were, like some sort of personality filter) never select the right ones. (As, in fact, Steve Wright suggests.)

Well, robert (and I am a male), I sort of understand that part already. At least, I accept it. But, so many of the people I meet don’t take the time to care about a religion whose ostensive teachings include not being a jerk. Most of us really have free reign there. And there is no group more suited to freethinking than Discordianism [If you don’t intend to read the Principia, anyone, please don’t click; it is a big long document and its on geocities, limiting the bandwidth available; but it is a fun read, thnx].

LOL; well, I do stereotype, but I don’t need a mantra to work passed it, I need to understand why it remains so compelling to keep it.

Lib, you are probably quite right. Perhaps I shouldn’t judge a faith by its followers as a matter of principle, but it is hard to see why the recognition of this gap should be necessary, even granting that we’re not perfect (which, of course, I do).

clairobscur, that is really a very interesting notion, especially if we give Captain Amazing’s statistic any weight (and I see no reason not to).

Shalmanese seems to have sat down with Steve Wright, but one of them didn’t synchronize their watches. :wink: Though again, this is an appealing interpretation.

xenophon, don’t think we Discordians don’t have our own method of hostile indoctrination [reference the Principia’s “Arguments for Evangelists”]. The success of this method, however, strangely depends on the character of one’s Mao button. A good Mao button is hard to come by. Perhaps all the nice Christians are keeping them hidden in some vast conspiracy to… wait. Nevermind. You didn’t read this.

FireWitch, I am certainly not trying to pigeon-hole a group, but I am trying to see that a group that should more or less be nicer than the average schmoe is, in my experience, not nicer than the average schmoe.

15

…

That was how you were meant to take it. Being a jerk has undoubtedly more to do with the person you are talking to than it does with the religion they profess. True Scotsman or not, people often use religion to justify how they were going to be anyway. Even with Christianity it depends on which aspects you are likely to take closer to heart:

ie.

Love thy nieghbor

or

Burning sinners in a lake of fire.

16

Well, part of me suggests that right there is part of the (perceived) problem. While based on empathy and compassion, the stress is often on the “less” side–sometimes, quite a lot less. Substitutionary atonement is a major part of many (not all, I’ve learned since starting to read the Dope) formulations of Christianity–and I’ve this suspicion that there’s an unavoidable tension in trying to simultaneously a) value being loving and caring, and b) spending a lot of energy glorifying anyone’s–be it beggar’s or God’s–horrific tortured death, and c) accepting that everyone (human, at least) deserves that kind of suffering, for the crime of being born human. Many Christians who place their religious investment in the substitutionary atonement doctrine do a far better job of resolving that tension in favor of striving to produce agape from it, mind. Others…don’t, and they of course leave the much larger, and much worse, impression of the group as a whole. (The majority, I think, just sort of muddle along like all us grunts, and thus are forgotten about entirely.)

Another factor is simply the nature of this place. By and large, it’s for discussion, so the people that stick around generally are interested in, well, discussing things. If their religious beliefs are a large part of the things they’re interested in discussing, they’re selected against if they’re jerks about doing so–sort of a large difference between here and out in the real world.

17

I think that part of the answer lies in several realities.

First, of the people in the US who claim they are Christians, a recent study suggests that less than 35% claim to believe that personal relationship with Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation. (I apologize for not having the cite handy, but I think it was Barrett and Johnson who did the study). Perhaps this is a controversial statement, but my understanding and experience of the Christian religion is that it is ALL based on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I think that there are many people who consider themselves Christians because of culture that are not really adherents to the Christian faith in practice. Therefore, I suspect that if you are like me, the vast majority of Christians you meet don’t act like it, think like it, or even know the most basic tenets of Christianity. Most professing Christians I know certainly don’t give any indication nor make claim that the power of God has changed or altered their lives. It is now a cliche passing through Christendom that “Christianity is not a religion it is a relationship.” I think that Christianity is obviously a religion, but it is a religion that is governed by a relationship, and if you don’t have that relationship, it doesn’t matter what you know about the religion or believe about the religion, you just won’t get it.

In my agnostic days, I was amazed that I knew more about Christian doctrine and the Bibile than a lot of Christians. This is not because I am brilliant, far from it (as you have doubtlessly surmised by now), but because a staggering number of people just have no clue as to what they actually believe or why they believe it. In my experience this is equally true of people of faith and agnostics and atheists. It is easy to have a basic world view that comports with one’s own logic without ever really considering all of the issues that derive from that world view.

Second, Christianity is composed of people, and since all people are fallible, you are going to find many that are Christian or who call themselves Christian who simply don’t live up to the title. Let’s face it, if Christians are right, then the stakes of being correct are huge, and some people in the process of wanting to show they are correct go overboard or worse yet, care more about being right than caring for the people around them. I have been there more than once from both sides of the argument. I think that many of the people who are considered right wing wackos come across that way because they show no compassion for people. There is an obvious tension when anyone claims to be Christian but does not love people. It just isn’t possible.

Of course, the other problem is a lot of people, of whatever faith or lack thereof, are plainly and simply jerks.

As a complete aside:

I don’t personally see any tension with substitutionary atonement. God is holy like water is wet. It is his nature. He therefore does not share his home with sin, as heaven is a perfect place. In spite of this, God loved us so much that he refused to let us be separated from him for eternity unless we chose to do so, so He took on the form of a man, died, rose again to pay for our sins. We are not separated from God eternally because we are human, but because of sin, and God took the heat for that by paying our price. In light of that, I do think it motivates to me to be kinder to people than would be my nature, because I realize that God has forgiven me of far greater wrongs than I would criticize others for. If there is a tension in any of those things, it has never occurred to me.

18

Just as long as we don’t get into an exhausting debate over what is “true” Christianity and what Jesus “truly” taught, I think I have a simple proof.

That is, most Christians in this country aren’t jerks because most people, by far, aren’t jerks and Christians are, by far, most people in this country. It’s as easy as that (though I have yet to provide a cite or conclusive proof for the second postulate, I continue to assert that it is the case nevertheless).

The real puzzler is: did a particularly nice take on Christianity make them nice, or did some nice aspect of their character draw them to the nice takes on Christianity? Dunno that even the people themselves will always have a good answer for that one (though of course some will feel the need to give a standard, theologically dictated answer), just as most people of any nice ideas or doctrine often have a hard time pinning it down.

But related to this line of thought, I think Lib’s take DOES border on the True Scotsman, if I’m reading him right (and unless he actually really just meant is what I’m about to say), but it is easy to refine so as to avoid the problem: we DON’T have to agree on any particular understanding of what the “genuine” teachings of Jesus were to acknowledge that people can still being perfectly ingenuine about their claim to be Christian. They can most certainly still simply use the idea of being Christian as an ingenuine means to a entirely different end of their own, whether that be tyrranical or even self-abusive.

And in that sense, though it may in some cases be just as difficult to distinguish as the conumdrum expressed prior, it is quite true that there could be many Christians running around totally misrepresenting Christianity, EVEN if we cannot agree definitively on what views and characters “Christianity” should represent.

—Problem is, to a Christian the non-believer is the one who seems uneccessarily closed-minded. And to the paranoid Christian; dangerously closed-minded.—

I’ve never quite understood this: how can not happening to believe one PARTICULAR thing make one more closeminded than someone who believes only one particular thing, let alone with full certainty?

19

Apos wrote:

I’m not defending closed-mindedness here, but just wanted to give you some idea of the perspective. Unless someone understands his experience with God to be subjective, he can become confused when others deny his experience.

It’s like two people walking along a creek. One sees a bridge, and the other doesn’t. They argue. The seer is dumbfounded that the nonseer denies that there is any bridge. The nonseer challenges the seer to walk across it. The seer does.

When he reaches the other side of the creek, the nonseer laughs and says, “Look at your feet, they’re soaking wet!” But the seer looks down and says, “What are you talking about? My feet are dry!”

20

I think I’m an exception to that general rule. I tend to see the fundamentalist Christians as being the ones who are dangerously closed-minded – mcuh more so than an agnostic.

Many fundamentalist Christians believe that God commands Christians to go around and spread the Gospel (their particular view of it) and “save” people. That’s why they are so vocal. They think that it is their Christian duty. Walking the talk is secondary at best.

Those Christians who are more open-minded themselves don’t necessarily see non-believers as closed-minded. I know that I don’t.

But I say that just having left a New Age forum where “skepticism” and “cynicism” are nasty words. (That’s why I left. That and the fact that they seemed to me to be some of the meanest people I’ve ever known.)

Does anyone ever admit to being closed-minded?