Well, it’s just my opinion, helped along by the number of times prr asks people to find specific times he was being hostile:
He also does this in other, similar threads, I have observed. The impression I’m left with is that he goes to great lengths to not specifically be hostile, but either to get as close as possible or do so with a semantic escape route planned (“Are you stupid? No, of course not”), leaving opponents unable to provide a clear unambiguous quote as evidence of such hostility. Why he plays such games instead of just being honest is unclear, though entertaining.
Why do you feel the belief in love is above ridicule? Can you prove it exists? Why do you feel the belief in the existence of concept is above ridicule? More specifically, why do you single out one concept as worthy of ridicule but accept others?
I refer you to Polycarp’s post #5 for a very eloquent explanation about why it’s not illogical to believe in things which are not empirically provable.
And your reply above is interesting, given that I first posted
To which you (I thought) earnestly replied that you don’t think you know everything and could be wrong (presumably to point out that you aren’t an arrogant atheist). When I subsequently posted that I should have qualified my earlier statement to clarify that I did not mean all atheists, your new retort (as quoted above) was a tad arrogant, wouldn’t you say?
You can’t honestly think it’s fine to ridicule a belief in god and also believe that that’s not being arrogant, surely? That’s kind of what the OP’s saying ‘Oh, I didn’t say you’re stupid, I’m just saying you’re ridiculous’. Um, yeah. Not really getting a distinction there.
You did grow up did you not? Because they taught me all sort of stuff when I was in grade school and when I went to high school they taught me some new things that made the old things wrong and then when I went to university I learned more new stuff that rendered the high school stuff obsolete and even since I’ve been out of school the world has changed and our knowledge has changed and things I learned in all those places have changed because of the advances of science. Certainly my ideas have changed since I was little. Don’t everyone’s?
Thank you for straightening me out. I related my life experience and you said I was showing ignorance. I called my brother and he remembered it the same way. My wife followed me by ten years and she said it was also her experience. Thanks I will tell them they also are ignorant. You of course must teach me what really happened to us all. They will want to remove their false memories too.
I have not challenged your experience (or that of your relatives).
You had a specific experience in a specific location, being taught and not taught particular things from which you drew the conclusion that your education was typical of what the RCC attempted to teach (and to hide). I have not challenged your experience. However, I have noted the particular reason behind one of your experiences (regarding visiting the services of other denominations) and I have noted that the separate experiences of my education (1950s - 1960s) and that of my parents (1920s - 1930s) differed from yours in that we were all taught the very things that you believe were forbidden to you as well as the history that you claim was hidden from you. My point was not that you were “ignorant” (except in the narrow definition of “not knowing”), but that your conclusions of what “the church” at large taught were in error, given that my parents and I were taught all those things by the very same church (although, clearly, not at the same parish or schools).
Well, yeah. You took the forty or more year old memory of a twelve-year-old and asserted, based on that narrow sampling, that the RCC (the whole church, not your parish) engaged in deliberate efforts to promote ignorance of others’ beliefs or its own troubled history. Given that you appear to have not known (or were ignorant of) the fact that the RCC as a whole (as demonstrated by the experiences of my family) has not deliberately fosterd ignorance of those topics, then your lack of knowledge on the topic is (by strict definition) ignorant. Note also that I did not say that you were (as a characteristic of your person) an “ignorant” human being), but that when you voiced your broad-brush and inaccurate claim about the church as a whole, you were displaying ignorance.
Just for the record, completely off the subject but illuminating on the issue of gonzomax’s experience:
I have numerous times been informed in so many words by Catholic laymen that the Catholic Church does not recognize the orders of Episcopal Church clergy as valid.
And I’ve been informed by a scholarly woman who is a licensiate from the Pontifical Academy in Rome that the official teaching of the church is quite a bit more nuanced – that they are prepared to believe that some Anglican clergy, including the majority of male American clergy ordained by bishops consecrated between 1946 and 1976, do in fact have valid orders.
The point behind this seeming hijack being that what one Catholic, even a parish priest, tells you about Catholic teachings is not necessarily the official teaching of the church. What I’m seeing Tom~ saying is that gonzomax got what he stated as having been taught from someone in a “siege mentality” about Catholicism vis-a-vis the rest of American Christian churches. Not that gonzomax was wrong – he was relating his own life experience, on which he is the obvious best authority – but that his teachers had not done what Tom~ believes was common elsewhere at the time, and that their methods were not in accord with the church’s official stance.
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To get back to the OP, I often find PRR’s posts to be arrogant and demeaning of believers. But I think he’s admirably clarified why he takes the stance he does, and I must admit that the psychological characteristics of believers and non-believers is a fascinating field.
Consider that Jesus and Paul both dwell on the lovingkindness and forgivingness of God far more than any other single aspect of Him other than perhaps holiness – yet the people who would legislate religion tend to focus on wrath, commandment, and hatred for sin to the exclusion of what the people they claim to follow considered it most important to stress. And completely miss the message about non-judgmentalism. (My taking umbrage at that stance, which I consider a perversion of Christianity as taught by Jesus Himself, was what apparently led badchad to focus on me, if I’m reading his posts correctly.) I’d be very interested in seeing them categorized according to PRR’s dichotomies. And likewise, those of us who profess liberal Christianity might similarly make an interesting group profile.
In other simpler words, those who don’t see the error of their beliefs by believing in something more and different than you believe in are supporting the evil fundies simply by believing?
Gee that reminds me of something, what could it be?
Oh yeah…it’s called believing something with no evidence. Some people call that obvious horseshit. Not me…but some people.
So the only way to satisfy you that I’m being honest would be to admit that deep down, I really think that Xians are stupid?
But if the truth is that I don’t think that Xians are stupider than other folks, or I don’t think that intelligence, however measured, ir especially relevant to this issue, or I think that my perceived low estimate of Xians’ intelligence has been used incorrectly as a stick to beat me over the head with (when there are other sticks available that actually address my real arguments), then why should I admit to a false assumption on your part?
In fact, I could easily argue that Xians could be excused for professing their beliefs if they lacked the ability to think adequately. “They don’t have the advanced brainstem necessary to form sufficiently complex thoughts to see the truth about Xianity” would be a completely satisfying explanation of the popularity of Xianity–except that I don’t happen to find Xians lacking in intelligence particularly. I taught at a Jesuit college, as I mentioned above, and whatever other complaints I had about my Jesuit colleagues, I couldn’t claim that they were any dumber than the lay faculty, including me.
Don’t you think it’s important to draw a distinction between a term that everyone finds pejorative, such as “stupid,” and more specific but less highly charged words, such as “ignorant”? Do you not see the difference between stupidity and ignorance? Am I really being asked to be deliberately, falsely, and gratuitously rude in the name of honesty, shortly after being roundly berated for defending badchad 's rudeness (on the grounds that too much importance was being placed on his manner of expression)? I felt that badchad’s rudeness was no big deal, was entertaining, brought certain issues out into high relief, and stressed some of fundamental differences with which various posters approached the question of religious belief–that said, his rudeness allowed people to make the discussion about manners rather than content, about form rather than substance, and while I enjoy my entertainment, I am ulitmately interested in discussing substance. I’m trying to avoid this particular hijack, and you are seemingly trying to insist I stick to the hijack.
Well, you could also say “water is wet”. They’re both equally obvious.
You could easily have started such a thread about linguistic distinctions without mentioning Christians at all, but that wouldn’t get your name in the metaphorical papers, just like how no-one cares if the Southern Baptists say Marilyn Manson is evil (yawn) but they take interest if they say Disney is evil (what, Disney?).
There wasn’t in any case any particular need for you to pick at this particular scab.
Yeah, there was. I realized that most people who thought about it felt pretty certain that I thought Xians were stupid, which was both incorrect and damaging to the point I was trying to make about Xianity and might want to make in the future, so I thought I’d try to clear that up.
Obviously, I still have some more work to do towards that end.
What fails to convince me of your honesty is the reasons I’ve already cited about loaded language and the “I’m not touching you!” style. I suggest you let this sit for a few weeks, or at least until badchad gets back so you can formally distance yourself from him in his first post-suspension anti-Christianity thread, which I’m willing to bet won’t take long.
Credibility, meantime, isn’t something you can argue yourself into.
Thanks for the unsolicited advice. How about this? You keep your advice to yourself, and I’ll be fine having no credibility with the likes of you. Does that work for you?
No, thank you for the unsolicited thread, inviting as it does all variety of comments, including a risk some of them will disagree with you and call your motives and writing style into question.
It may not be honest, but at least it’s a little brave.
I’d like to float an idea, let’s see how long until it is sunk…
Humans, generally, can be stupid - that is to say that amongst humans, stupidity is not a scarce commodity, but human stupidity in a general sense is quite randomised - so like background white noise is something you can tune out of your attention, background random stupidity (white stupidity?) is not completely impossible to ignore.
Christians - and possibly other groups sharing a strong common interest and that have elevated levels of social and conversational interaction and sharing of ideas - have a tendency for their collective stupidity to form a coherent pattern - pink stupidity, which is much more difficult to ignore, even if the overall level is not any greater (which it may in fact be, because the interaction element might amplify the effect).
Interesting. I think that can acount for part of it, but there’s a flip side: organized groups, whether stupid or not, invite enemies, and those enemies tend to portray them using the enemy’s own criteria of bad qualities. Gay rights advocates earn enmity from some Christians who consider them immoral. Hippies earn enmity from some straitlaced folks who consider them stinky and lazy. Christians earn enmity from some atheists who consider them stupid. These labels often tell as much about the namecaller as they do about the namecallee.
If I may turn this around, especially given your example of your father-in-law (whom you describe as “marginally equipped intellectually”), an equally valid point seems as if it’d be, “People who ask, ‘are you calling me stupid?’ are generally correct: I AM calling them stupid.” Then you call it a hijack when people point out what you’re doing, and go to great pains to give what appears to me to be an equivocating denial of any beliefs about their stupidity.
That’s not something that you can change easily, I’m afraid. If you believe in your heart that someone–your FIL, Christians, folks who don’t parse poetic rhythm the same as you–are stupid, folks are going to know, and they’re going to be pretty insulted by it, and they’re likely to call you out on it. Unless you can find a way to show respect for your opponents positions and not ascribe them to being marginally equipped intellectually, I suspect that pattern will continue.
If you’re okay with that continuing pattern, well, booyah. If it irritates you, though, it’s up to you to stop it.
I never said “belief” in love is above ridicule. It is an immeasurable emotion. One man’s love is another man’s companionship is another man’s S&M session, is another man’s pedophilia, is another man’s forced female circumcision, etc. It is a personal delusion that is interpreted by different people in different ways (and doesn’t always manifest itself in sweetness and hearts, either, I might add).
There is an assumption among theists that because they believe their delusional dogma (which is cherry-picked, ad nauseum) is superior to another believer’s (or a non-believer’s) that we should afford it some sacred protection from criticism.
“Believers” subvert science. That in itself is reason to ridicule them. There is not one shred of proof; not one piece of corroborating evidence that points to the existence of any god, particularly one that gives a shit about anything happening here on Earth. And yet people continue to indoctrinate innocent children into this dangerous, mind-numbing facade rather than teaching them how to think. Both religion and love are delusional as anything but an idea; both have been proven to be capable of doing great harm.
How could you believe that god speaks to only the people whose actions (sometimes) please you and not believe that it’s possible that he’s speaking to those who committed the 9/11 disaster? By entertaining the thought that there’s a god who communicates with some, you open the door for his communicating with People You Don’t Like.
