No, but if you had to choose as to which of the two were more likely to have done so…
I’m not dishonest enough to spout some atheist variation on the “hate the sin, love the sinner” rhetoric that many Christians are fond of. Criticizing what people believe is criticizing them.
I know which one has done more for me, I love Duel.
I think most people are able to separate belief from the believer.
I don’t; and I think the great majority of the people who claim to do so are lying so they can bash people while pretending to be all about “Christian love” and further beating on anyone who argues with them as being “intolerant”.
I see. I can’t immediately think of a way to test the concept, so unless you can, I suppose we’ll just have to disagree.
<Yoda> But it will, it will</Yoda>
All people - including scientists - are very good at deluding themselves. The distinction is whether you try to challenge your beliefs in your own mind, or be open to evidence challenging your beliefs.
And I’d say** all** people have faith in spite of scientific evidence. And those who believe in young earth creationism have faith despite “proof” (or as close as we’ll ever come to proof) to the contrary.
I’ve been there. When I was young I went to Hebrew School where I learned about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and David in a very similar way to the way I learned about Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln in school. That was evidence, which I treated in the same way. But when in high school I discovered when the Bible was actually written, and how, the scales fell away. I’m not giving myself any credit here, since I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body so this was not a difficult or emotional experience. But millions of people see the same evidence and either reject it outright or come up with an explanation of inspiration or something. And that is faith.
That’s an interesting statement. Back 1,000 years ago most people were protected from conflicting beliefs by the church. Heck, they are protected from them now in Communist China to a large part. In these cases I agree that you should separate them, since the belief is not freely chosen.
But in the US this isn’t true. Once we are adults if we isolate ourselves from conflicting views it is out of choice. Would you say that a person who claims Obama is a Kenyan Islamist has a belief separated from his personality? What we choose to believe says a lot about who we are.
I’m embarrassed to say I feel uncertain of whether this is serious or very dry wit. I’m going to assume the former. It sounds like you have had a strong attachment to an idea that is sort of like “religion = pathology”, and it’s upsetting to you to think that religion might be an entirely natural result of naive human cognition. Is that right? If so, I’'m not sure why it should be horrifying. It’s been demonstrated that superstitions are a “normal” response to unpredictable stimuli – it’s even possible to train animals to engage in superstitious behavior. I would think religion could easily be seen as simply an extension of this.
Yes, I would [say that a person who claims Obama is a Kenyan Islamist has a belief separated from his personality]. There is some correlation between beliefs and other traits (such as aspects of personality), but it’s not so strong as to justify treating all believers of any creed as interchangeable or homogenous. We are large, we contain multitudes.
By the way, it seems to me that all the arguments for the existence of God that I’m familiar with, even if accepted, lead only to the existence of a very amorphous God, and certainly never to the specific God of any particular religion. So the very best a Christian, say, could do with these arguments is to get me to be a theist. Right?
How do you think we choose beliefs? We choose a set of beliefs based on our personalities - they don’t get randomly imposed on us.
Our beliefs are part of our personalities. Magically remove all of your beliefs and you’d be effectively a different person. There’d be very little of what makes you, you left except for any inborn genetic tendencies you might have.
Well, shoot. This is a very interesting topic, which I should have thought better of addressing, as I leave for vacation tomorrow morning and will be unable to post. When I return, I will start a new thread on this topic, if you wish to wait 10 days or so.
Apologies for the (temporary) cop-out.
No worries. Many of us have lives too.
Ooh, I can’t wait! Here’s my opinion! (Opinions are like armpits…nearly everybody has a couple…)
To some degree, beliefs can and should be separated from believers. I hold with a very weak form of the “memetics” idea, the idea that ideas have a kind of independent existence, and wander around looking for minds to contain them. It’s only a metaphor, not a scientific reality, but it has some descriptive value.
The example I keep coming back to is Christian Science. The idea is one of the most hellishly evil concepts ever, and it has caused immeasurable human suffering. And yet, of the hundreds of Christian Science believers I’ve met, every loving on of them is a good person, who would never, ever, deliberately cause harm to as much as a bullfrog, let alone a human. The religious idea is as evil as anything Satan could have dreamed up in two thousand years, and yet the people who hold it (or are, perhaps, held by it) are not evil at all.
The same might have been said about millions of rank-and-file communists all during the Cold War era. Many of them actually believed the drivel about communism being the great shining path forward to liberty, freedom, etc. They were wrong, that’s all. Again, many of the people in the French Revolution believed good things – which were expressed in horribly evil ways.
(The movement to abolish slavery in Britain was set back by ten years by Revolutionary France passing laws abolishing slavery. No one in Britain wanted to appear pro-French, even when the ideas were actually very good ones!)
The end result is still that these not evil people are engaged in evil acts due to their beliefs, how do you separate this? believers vote, they raise (and abuse in the process) children, shop, and basically live their lives colored by their beliefs. You personally may believe in evolution but may do not, and the very phrase “believe in evolution” is nonsense. Evolution is a fact in the same sense that gravity is a fact. Stating a non-belief in this is ludicrous but its a common phrase among this nations leaders. Saying you do not believe in evolution is like saying you don’t believe in chairs. People who say things like this look insane to the rational mind.
Once again belief with no evidence is inherently delusional. Given that we live in a world where the obviously delusional are allowed to do things like pass laws and abuse children, are we really supposed to let this continue because that’s just the way it is? If you are not trying to make this world a better place you are holding the rest of us back. If you are going out of your way to impair progress and the betterment of the entire human race based on your beliefs then you are engaged in evil in the same sense that slavery was evil, that racism is evil, that treating women like cattle is evil.
Although Der Trihs scorned it, I use the Christian “hate the sin, love the sinner” model of debate. When faced with Christian Scientists, or creationists, or Birthers, or whatever, I open with respectful disagreement, and utilize the legitimate tools of debate. If they get nasty, maybe I get nasty too…or else just walk away.
Yes, they vote. Nothing much we can do about that; democracy is too great an ideal to ruin by imposing external controls and rules. It’s bad enough that money has such a huge role in elections.
In my opinion, it is the ideas themselves that are our enemies, not the people holding them. If I can deal with it in this way, I consider it more respectful.
If they, themselves, reject this distinction – if my correspondent says “I am in a close personal relationship with Jesus, and your disbelief hurts me in a deep and personal way” – then there isn’t a lot further I can go with my preferred approach. If he won’t let me distinguish between the believer and the belief, I’m pretty much stuck. I will continue to address the idea rather than the person holding it, but we would be engaging in a mixed-up kind of cross-dialogue. Messy.
I noticed tons of sites concluding it just like this, but I think they give the wrong impression. Look how they divided up two of the questions. Combine the figures, you get 79%. Ask that 79% which stories they take literally. That is what is important. The questions are flawed by the way they worded it and divided it into different questions. But notice the wording of it. This link also noticed Gallop didn’t do a good job of wording it, and how everyone starting reporting this poll as only 3 in 10 take the bible literally. Here’s a more critical piece of the Gallop poll from a believers perspective saying it could have easily been titled U.S., 8 in 10 Say They Take the Bible as Inspired. At least here, I think he has a point.
As I’ve stated elsewhere, 61% of Americans in a ABC poll take Genesis literally, and 60% take Noah and the global flood literally.
In various CBS polls shows 55% of Americans take the creation story literally, another 27% say humans evolved but God guided the process, with only 13% saying human evolved without God guiding the process.
The Barna Group is also in line with these when you get more specific about which biblical stories Americans believe as literal.
What do you think?
Not exactly, no. I’m okay with various religious beliefs being the “entirely natural result of naive human cognition” – but I guess I’d always figured it’d be pegged to something a little more meaningful.
I mean, sure, I understand stone-age cultures praying for much-needed rain, or whatever; you want something from mindless entity X, you know how to deal with guy Y, and so you anthropomorphize up a big fine deity Z: the super-powered version of A Man We Can Do Business With, someone who’ll taketh a sacrifice and giveth that life-or-death boon in exchange.
And I understand how such folks could likewise postulate a reassuringly familiar explanation for the sun traveling across the sky, and doubly so when an eclipse surprises the heck out of your whole tribe and leaves the lot of you at a loss for words. Sure. Fine. “Project much?” Yes. Yes, they do. Story ensues.
But Mr Duality ain’t them. He can offer a perfectly mundane explanation for wind on most other occasions, and he could’ve done it here. He didn’t see X as Y because he wanted something from Z, he saw X as Y because he wanted a Z. He didn’t believe this particular wind was miraculous because it helped or harmed anyone; it didn’t accomplish anything else, but he didn’t really want anything else; he found it miraculous because it could have been miraculous, because that’s what he wanted.
IMHO, that’s a different kind of strange. It’s, like, a stark and existential kind of strange. I found it unsettling.
Joking? Please say you’re joking. (I’m easily whooshed…)