You want me to cite that most people are the religion of their parents? How utterly sad.
Not everyone has the same life experiences, same intellectual development, same level of intelligence, same willingness to fight against cultural norms. We’re different people. Some people, although perfectly intelligent will believe stupid things. So my comment was based on the idea that Miller was out of line by suggesting that Der was saying that women were stupid and needed his guidance.
Not all people live my life. I have several advantages in that my mom is only a lax parishioner. Aside from that, there are innumerable other things both social and physical that allowed me to fight off the hold of religion. Just how your life conspired to make you, a very smart person, accept the nonsense of religion as an adult.
Intelligence helps, but it isn’t the only factor.
No. Aristotle was probably more intelligent than you are or I am, but he was wrong an awful lot.
No, you want me to say that because it lets you sit happy knowing that the only people who can disagree with you are jerks.
You are obviously intelligent, but intelligent people do stupid things. And believing in a God with no evidence, is in my opinion, quite a stupid thing. But you’re the victim here, not a villain. And you aren’t stupid for believing, just wrong.
Of course, what’s really funny is that this argument has been put forward, in complete seriousness! People have said, “Liberals aren’t really tolerant, because they reject racists and neo-Nazis and female genital mutilators and…”
As if, somehow, there is a second-order “meta-” tolerance that requires even good people to be tolerant of evil!
A lesser sin, and one most of us could probably confess to, is being slightly hypocritical in our denunciation of evil. We (being human) have a tendency to say “That guy, over there, whose views are hateful and completely different from mine, is a reeking, evil, odious, unutterable scummy stinkard…”
But… “That guy, over there, whose views are hateful and yet rather similar to mine, is a rotten villainous scoundrel…”
i.e., I, being a liberal, am likely to denounce stupid, evil liberals slightly less vehemently than I will denounce stupid, evil conservatives…
I wouldn’t say it is that irrational. You should target what is wrong with them.
As the Catholics say, hate the sin and not the sinner. Hate their bigotry but don’t hate them.
I’ve never considered that anything more than propaganda, at best. A way of pretending they don’t hate people even as they do everything they can to harm those people. A rather disgusting combination of self righteousness, false benevolence and malice.
Hates what I am, but not me? Hates what I believe, but not me? Would fight me tooth and nail to remove my right to control my own reproduction, all in the name of christian love?
I can’t even fathom that idea.
I do not believe they can have it both ways. If they hate the sin, they are the ones defining the sin. That gives them power. If they love me, but hate what they have defined as my sin, that makes them benevolent.
How can they hide such an grand load of control under an insipid little statement like : hate the sin, not the sinner? It only has merit in an effort to baffel with bullshit.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, U.S. Senator Kay Hagan and U.S. Representatives Doris Matsui, Judy Biggert and Carolyn Maloney are all members of the Association of Junior Leagues International which bars men from becoming members.
I realize that you’re having some fun here, but I just want to point out that Nancy Pelosi has never tried to enforce church doctrine in the civil arena, even in areas where the bishops have said that good Catholics should.
Oh wait, I guess that does have some bearing on the discussion. Well-played, sir.
No, I want you to provide a cite for the claim that started this line of argument, which was the implication that Catholic women have been “indoctrinated from birth” and therefore “don’t choose to be members”. I am asking you to provide a reliable cite backing up your claim that most women who are Catholic, are Catholic for the reason that they were indoctrinated from birth. Obviously the claim that you initially made is very different from merely saying “most people are the religion of their parents”. As I said, numerous research studies have investigated whether childhood indoctrination is the main reason for people’s religious choices. (If I recall correctly, I’ve given you links to such studies in past threads.) I’m asking you whether you can cite any of these studies to back up your claim that Catholic women are Catholic because of “childhood indoctrination”.
I would take a look at some of those links if you have them handy, ITR champion. It seems pretty straightforward to me that most people are Catholic because they were raised that way.
You need to understand what you’re doing here. You’re getting off on a semantic tangent because you are unable or unwilling to address the rest of my post.
Please answer the rest of my previous post.
In answer to your problem, when children are raised in a Catholic home they are indoctrinated from birth. If you have trouble with that concept, I’m not sure what I can say. It is a fact that most people are the religion of their parents. If you are asserting that they randomly choose that religion when they get older, well, that’s simply nonsense.
If most people are the religion of their parents, then being brought up in a religion increases the chances of taking on that religion. If you don’t want to call that indoctrination, what word do you choose?
The rest of your previous post (assuming you meant #41) doesn’t address my argument. You said “Most Christians don’t choose to be members.” But all human beings have free will, and therefore all human beings who are members of a church do, in fact, choose to be members of that church. (Excepting certain people that can be enrolled in a church by others.) Even if “not everyone has the same life experiences, same intellectual development, same level of intelligence, same willingness to fight against cultural norms”, none of that changes the fact that people have free will. We all have free will in terms of which religion to practice just as we have free will in terms of what we choose to eat, drink, wear, drive, and so forth. The mere fact that people have different life experiences, different levels of intelligence, and so forth, does not prove that free will and choice are absent.
You then brought up the example of Aristotle as someone who was intelligent but often wrong. Well, if we want to proceed on a discussion of intelligent, we need to know how you define intelligence. My dictionary includes the definition “aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, &c..”, which would seem to support the way I defined it earler: “the ability to distinguish between what is and isn’t true”.
Then you said, “You are obviously intelligent, but intelligent people do stupid things. And believing in a God with no evidence, is in my opinion, quite a stupid thing.” If I meet anyone who believes in a God with no evidence, I’ll let them know.
I have never asserted that anyone randomly chooses his or her religion. On the contrary, everyone who I’ve discussed the matter at depth with has chosen his or her religion carfully and judiciously.
Teaching? Education? The word “indoctrination” implies something deceptive, harmful, or illegitimate involved. I’m asking you to provide evidence from a reliable source to back up your claim that there is such a thing going on in most religious upbringings. Instead you keep repeating that most people are the religion of their parents, as if that proved the point. Most people who wear socks had parents who wore socks, yet I’ve never encountered anyone complaining about the fact that parents indoctrinate their children into wearing socks.
If I lie to you, and tell you that the blue pill is harmless sugar and the red pill is a poison that will surely kill you, you didn’t meaningfully choose the blue pill.
Religious parents impart false information to their children, which makes choosing less meaningful. If you believe an invisible, intangible spirit who can see all and is without limit to its power will punish you for choosing B, you very reasonably choose A. You’re choosing with a gun to your head.
Of course we have free will. But a hedge against that is parents telling their children that they will earn the hatred of the creator of the universe if they choose B.
It’s not free will if I put a gun to your head. At least not meaningfully.
It’s the ability to use the information you have. If your information is made up of lies, like all religion, you can’t use your intelligence without rejecting the lies. But a strong indoctrination, makes it harder to reject the information you’ve been given.
Even you, a very intelligent person, are unable to reject the backwards nonsense of religion. It’s not about intelligence, it’s about how deep the hooks are in.
Everyone believes in God with no evidence. Believing with no evidence is the definition of faith.
And randomly, they overwhelmingly choose the religion they were born into. People trick themselves to think they have reasoned religious beliefs. But they don’t.
Religion is harmful, if you value dealing with reality. Religion teaches people to dwell on delusion instead of dealing with the real world we live in. I will grant that religion might have some positive effects, like frightening people from doing wrong. But it does so by creating a security camera in the sky that isn’t really there.
You are raising a nonsense argument against the term indoctrination, because you don’t want to believe that it’s what happening. But it is.
in·doc·tri·na·tion [in-dok-truh-ney-shuhn] Show IPA
noun
the act of indoctrinating, or teaching or inculcating a doctrine, principle, or ideology, especially one with a specific point of view: religious indoctrination.
I understand that all you have is semantic hand-waiving to keep from facing the underlying meaning of my argument. I hope that this will settle your ire.
You think that cultural clothing rules aren’t passed down? Good thing for the Sari makers that all those Indian ladies randomly choose to wear them every year. :rolleyes:
Of course we adhere to our cultural roots, if I was bought up in a Catholic family odds are I am going to consider myself catholic. Nothing earth shattering here.
Of course we could argue that they are ignorant to the teachings of the church [sexism, etc] but remember the church should only be a gathering place and that the relationship that exists is only between you and god.
I can actually see it, if applied carefully. For instance, take the behavior of prison officials as they go through the process of executing someone for a capital crime. They are, in one sense, expressing the deepest possible hatred: they’re putting the sum’bitch to death.
But in another sense, they do not express hatred. They go about the business coldly, clinically, and even with a rough kind of human respect. They don’t kick the man around, spit on him, curse him, or laugh at him. (Well, unless he’s Saddam Hussein…) Instead, they treat him properly, maybe a bit distantly. They give him a last meal. They allow him to utter a few last words. They even show a bit of gentleness in the final strapping down and injecting.
It is not an ignoble ideal. Instead, I would say the fault is in the “Fred Phelps” attitudes of far too many religious conservatives, where they fall short of the ideal, and express hatred for the behavior and for the people engaging in it.
The ideal isn’t at fault; the fault is of people who claim to espouse it…but don’t really.
The people who sentence the guy to death are free to hate his guts, and those people are a better comparison than the corrections officials are. In terms of its real world applications, the idea is frequently bullshit. Once you start talking about hatred, you’re unlikely to make fine distinctions of this type - the guy who gets killed doesn’t really give a crap; it’s about making the audience feel better about themselves.