At the request of Cosmosdan, Tomndebb and Suburban Plankton for a new thread, here’s my thesis. Attack at will.
Feel free to bring up any questions that you think were insufficiently addressed in the original thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7829064#post7829064
Your parents provide life, then support and life lessons. They are the voice you hear every day. Tossing of your training is difficult.
Parents are proud of how their child accepts training. I would feel better if you helped teach your offspring how to think, not what to think.
Maybe the evils of religious training are being taught to the world again. Hope it takes this time. Muslims and christians should be ashamed of what they have created.
It is eventually on the shoulders of the kids to step off on their own.
Our history of religious wars should help.
I was expecting something inflamatory from your thesis, but as carefully as I’ve read it, I can’t see how anyone could or would disagree. Perhaps you might want to drop the “often” and “frequently” in favour of “always” if you are looking for an argument.
The thesis is self consistent, well stated and sensible, and it makes clear what the premises are without begging the question on the particulars, as far as I can discern. Did not expect any less, if I may say so.
Now, some People of Belief may attempt to argue that their belief is based on reason and experience as per their standards, not yours; or that a non-rational basis they have is just as good or better. But then that would **not ** be challenging the thesis that handed-down belief systems should not be adopted uncritically; it would be debating the specific tools to be used to make that critical evaluation.
Originally Posted by badchad
I’m totally on board with that.
well, that’s part of the problem right there, in my estimation. In many cases those who promulgate the evil religion has wrought through countless wars are either ignorant of history or are enboldened by a fractured version of it.
In my opinion, it all boils down to an undeveloped ability to think critically. I can only speak for Christianity since that’s my family’s background, though I believe other religions work similarly, but you’re actually taught from early childhood not to question, but to accept, with an open heart, anything the bible teaches.
I don’t understand why people seem to be so surprised that this proclivity not to question would translate into everything in a Christian’s life as s/he grows older. If you’re taught one way of thinking from as far back as you can recall imagine how strong an impetus must be to have any chance of shaking you from it, especially once you’ve reached adulthood. I imagine it as synaptic pathways in the brain that have been ‘burned-in’ such that traffic only goes through some and not others. Over time, the unused pathways, the ones that would be used to route the electrical impulses through parts of the brain that inspire/control critical thinking, fall into a kind of hybernation. As a person continues to age throughout adulthood those dormant synapses have continually lower chances of ever firing.
Yeah, I know, that’s kind of out there, but I do believe there’s something physiological about a general inability to divorce one’s self from an unsubstantiatable mythology after reaching a certain age, or at least a much lower chance to do so.
I agree.
Being human it is a hard process to sort out the truth from tradition and to encourage others to do so as well. I think Jesus tried to do this and they hated him for it. He spoke pretty plainly and critically to the religious leaders of his day. They were pissed.
One of your links from the other thread goes to a “Should we admire Jesus” page.
Here Jesus is saying the truth is the only worthy goal. In our quest for it we cannot be deterred by family traditions or the desire for family approval.
He says that sort of thing quite a lot. It’s not hateful speech. It’s about dedication.
Somewhat related;
1:I think some people accept things by association. In my case I had a spiritual experience and gravitated toward the people I was around at the time so I accepted their beliefs. My emotional investment in them and the church made it hard to sort things out. Eventually being true to myself was more important than approval.
2:The nature of spiritual beliefs is largely subjective in nature. In that sense the evidence and experience that changes them one way or the other is unique to the individual.
3: People can be true to themselves and still believe very different things. IMHO being true to yourself is key. Being an atheist for the sake of tradition and/or approval is just as intellectually dishonest as embracing religious beliefs for the same reasons
I disagree passionately with the OP. Brainwashing is a fine and wonderful thing that we need more of. One should hold to beliefs unwaveringly, no matter how demonstrably stupid they are.
badchad, furt makes the point well. What is there to disagree with?
You may have simply used this as an example, Cosmo, but I have never, ever heard of anyone adhering to atheism for the sake of tradition or approval. It simply doesn’t work that way. One comes to atheism through careful and somewhat frustrating reflection and consideration. Some, like me, have lost the closeness of siblings over it. Atheists swim against the tide. We take our positions with the knowledge that there may be very few who agree with us or see things our way, yet we remove the yoke of theological belief anyway. Atheism is not a club and it’s not something that’s practiced. Although I’ve met quite a few atheists in my life I have more than a distant acquaintanceship with none of them. Most of the people I associate with on a daily basis just happen to be Christian or Jewish.
I hold to a narrow definition of atheism that states definitively that there are no gods, or other supernatural entities, except that which humans create in their own minds. People who say they used to be atheists but are now Christians were never atheists, but agnostics; no one would decide to dismiss the processes of logical introspection that are interwoven into an atheist’s world view unless they were never an atheist in the first place. Although I’m cordial with everyone and honestly try to avoid insulting someone because of their religious beliefs, I know that true believers of any mythology are deluded, some to a greater degree than others.
I realized I was an atheist (although I didn’t call myself that) when I was in my early teens. My mother dragged me to church every Sunday. I went through the motions but I didn’t believe. Eventually my mother stopped forcing me to go. It was just as sad for me as it was for her because i wanted to believe as much as she wanted me to, but simply couldn’t. Everything about Christianity had holes large enough for me to crawl through, and I crawled through every one of them.
A number of Christians with whom I’ve discussed religion tend to equate atheism with a religious belief. I guess it’s the only way they can make sense of it. They lump it in with everything else they don’t believe in. On one side there’s Christianity, on the other there’s Buddhism, Shintoism, Judiasm, Islam, Wicca, Satanism, atheism, etc…, but then atheism also has the honor of being placed into a subset of beliefs considered undesireable, eg, Wicca, Satanism, athiesm, etc… Since atheism isn’t a religion or a belief, but an absence of belief, it’s incorrect to lump it in or equate it with any other mythological belief system.
As an admittedly weak analogy, say you’re sitting across the table from a friend who’s drinking coffee out of a white mug. You don’t have any coffee. You’re just sitting there, mugless. You and your friend can discuss your friend’s mug, the shape of it, the color, other characteristics, but you can’t talk about, see, or feel your mug, neither can your friend, because you don’t have one. You can’t equate what you have in front of you with your friend’s mug because you are sans mug. Your friend’s personal experience with his mug is entirely different than yours. In fact, you have no mug experience whatsoever, not just a different mug. Make sense?
So it’s not a good idea to believe something you know isn’t true? Wow. who knew?
Actually, isn’t it impossible to believe something you know is not true?
The main problem with this thesis is that it starts from the assumption that the beliefs in question are false. In saying that the beliefs are accepted only because they have been around for a while implies that they are not true, else this would be an additional reason to believe them. So it essentially boils down to “we shouldn’t believe things that are not true”, which is hardly startling. I think some work needs to be put into why the beliefs are wrong in the first place rather then just assuming that they are as the starting point of the thesis.
Another problem though is the connection implied between the age of a belief and the truth of it. While not directly stating it there is an underlying assumption that any belief that has been “handed down” is necessarily wrong, and that any belief that we form based on our experience and reason must be right. This is also not true. Age of a belief does not determine its truthfulness. There are some things that have been believed for quite a long time that are nevertheless true, and many modern beliefs that are false. Taken to an extreme this results in sophistry, since anything that we believe today will be the recieved wisdom in a few generations, and therefore must be false, in essense meaning that we cannot know anything true. It also runs counter to academia, where the age of a belief actually makes it more likely to be true. The longer a belief can stand to scrutiny in general the more likely (although not certain by any means) it is to be true.
Bob
I think this is implicit in the clause “even when your own reason and experience would tell us they are wrong”, rather than assumed. I don’t think badchad is attempting to address those cases of handed-down belief that are demonstrably true.
This is entirely due to your own surroundings, in which presumably the majority of people arn’t atheists. There is no reason why if atheism was the dominant belief that people wouldn’t fall into that because of tradition or approval. Certainly there have been societies (communist Russia and China come to mind) where atheism (of the communist flavour) was certainly the dominant belief and people were coerced into accepting it, to the point of persecution. Secondly it kind of smacks of a sense of elitism. You seem to be saying that you and all atheists come to your beliefs through rigourous thought, which implies that everyone else comes to their beliefs lightly and that it is really only the atheists who put any thought into it. I know many people of different faiths who put a lot of thought into their beliefs. People come to different conclusions because of the premises that they accept, not because of their intellectual ability.
Out of interest, do you consider anyone who disagrees with you on anything deluded, or is it just religious matters? Deluded seems quite over the top. Mistaken I could go with, but deluded has such a negative commotation that there is the implication that there is something wrong with the tought processes of someone that disagrees with you.
While we can get bogged down in semantic issues of what qualifies as a religion and what doesn’t (and there is no concrete definition anyway), I would consider Atheism a “worldview” the same as different religions. In the end Atheism is a set of answers to the fundamental questions about the reality of the world, such as the existence of Gods and the supernatural, what happens after death, the nature of man, ect. Atheists have a set of answers to those questions the same as religious people do, and in that sense Atheism and religions are the same.
So I think your example of the coffee cup in this way falls flat. It would work if you were an extreme agnostic who claimed to have absolutely no beliefs about the world around you. In your definition of atheism however you do have your own set of beliefs, and therefore you could talk about what it is that you believe and why you believe it. A certain disbelief in something is still a belief.
Bob.
Actually, for this to be more correct neither of you would have a mug. You’d be discussing your friend’s belief that he is holding a mug and drinking coffee from it. Friend says, “The reason you don’t see the mug is because you don’t believe in the mug strongly enough”. Similar statements have been said on this board by believers. It’s pretty ridiculous declaration, imo.
It’s threads like these that should make us all miss Liberal. I know he helped me, at least, to see that faith was a valid epistemology. He was also good at highlighting the importance of personal revelation for many believers, a part of spirituality that most athiests completely fail to appreciate.
As for the OP (and Onomatopoeia): the retention rates for all spiritual beliefs (including atheism and agnosticism) among families and communities are extremely high. Please keep this in mind when throwing around words like “brainwashing” or holding out your own belief system as extra-valid.
Is this not proof that the only reason you hold onto a particular belief is that your family indoctrinated you to it as you were growing up?
Btw. Atheism is not a spiritual belief. It is not a belief at all. It is the lack of belief. The only way an atheist can change is to become non-atheist, or theist. At which point they are no longer an atheist. A theist on the other hand has a plethora of religions to choose from. A christian can convert to Islam. A Muslim can convert to Judaism (at least until one of his former mates decides to off him for it). A Jew can convert to Christianity. They all remain a theist in so doing. They all believe in god. That they don’t do so more often convinces me that the main reason Christians remain Christian, Jews remain Jewish, and Muslims remain members of Islam, is because of what their families believed before them.
The point is that ALL people’s beliefs (whether they be theist, atheist or what) are strongly influenced by what they were raised as. This is a constant across all different belief systems. It says nothing of the inherent truthfulness of the beliefs, just that humans in general don’t readily change their beliefs.
A few points:
Atheism is a spiritual belief. Agnosticism is a lack of belief. Once you assert that there is no god (the core of Atheism) you are making a positive statement. If you merely believe that there is no proof or disproof that there is a God, then you have to accept that you don’t know if there is a God or not. Given no information the logical default position is not “it does not exist”, the logical default position is “I don’t know whether it exists or not”.
There are many different belief sets that fall into the category of atheism, just as there are for theism, depending on what you affirm about the world around you. For instance there is naturalistic atheism, existentialist atheism, nihlist atheism, communistic atheism, anachic atheism, utilitarian atheism and the will to power stuff that Nietzsche came up with. Atheism is not a “one size fits all” belief. It is also possible to interconvert between forms. For instance a naturalist atheist could become a nihlist.
While it is certainly true that your parents beliefs go a long way to shaping your own, the same can also be said of atheism as well. However there also have been many millions of people throughout history that have chosen to reject the beliefs of their upbringing and embrace different beliefs. Nearly all religions started off as small groups and grew from there. The only way they could do that is through people converting. The whole “you only believe in God because your parents do” begs the question how did their parents come to believe in God.
Bob.
I’m not an atheist(for the record), but I gotta say: How many times do we have to argue this point?
Agnosticism is position that it is unknown whether or not there is a God; in the stronger form, Agnosticism is the position that it cannot be known whether or not there is a God.
Atheism is the absence of belief in a God (that’s the literal meaning of the word); in the stronger form (which is rather uncommon), Atheism is the assertion that there is no God.
None of these amount to being a ‘spiritual belief’, except by murderous dilution of the term.
That tends to be a determining factor, yes. I mentioned it because of the attitude among many here that their atheism is a sign of independence, while the theism of others is a sign of indoctrination. In reality, most American atheists would probably not be atheists if their parents had been more devoutly religious – their spiritual beliefs tend to be just as much a product of their upbringing as the beliefs of theists.
This is really a question of how you want to use the words. Just so there’s no misunderstanding, feel free to replace the words “spiritual beliefs” in my last post and this one with “physical/metaphsical tenets,” or whatever else makes those sentences meaningful to you.