The thing about religious beliefs is that they’re not fundamentally all that different from other beliefs. Any belief implies that you think that people who believe a different thing are wrong about that aspect of the world - that’s what believing something means. You’re a vegetarian who believes that meat eating is wrong? Then you think that most of your neighbors who happily guzzle steak, are doing something bad. You’re a Libertarian who believes that the free market will solve nearly every problem in the best way possible? Then you think all those northern european social welfare nations have made some really bad decisions and are heading for a fall. And of course, atheism is a belief too (note, I don’t say ‘a religion’ … but it is a belief about the nature of reality)
Most normal people are pretty well used to the idea that nobody believes all the same things that you do. Some people believe things that are quite close, so you say ‘well, I think you’re mostly right’ and others are so far off that you wonder what planet they’re living on - and of course, they’re doing the same thing by you.
The thing about religious belief that seems to separate it from other kinds of belief (but actually doesn’t) is that the thing being believed about actually is really important. People will often say “oh I don’t care about religion, it isn’t important to me” but IMO what this actually means is either “I have a firm belief about God that I’m really confident of - it’s ‘He doesn’t exist’” or “I have no confidence in my ability to sort out the question, so I’m going to give up now, rather than wrestling with it for 50 years and then giving up”
But in any case, I would hope that everybody has something that they consider a really important core belief, so just ask yourself - ‘well, how do ***I *** feel about people who have different beliefs in that particular area?’ Whatever it is.
I’m a practicing Catholic and have been my whole life. Being raised by parents who were of differing religions (mom was a protestant), I was taught the principles of both religions and allowed to choose one of the religions practiced in my home, or to find another one if I so desired. My parents believed that if there were not multiple valid paths to God, then God wouldn’t tolerate multiple religions practiced in his name.
I am a very tolerant person when it comes to religions. Many have practices that I don’t understand or condone, but I realize that different cultures with different histories will have established these practices because they made sense to them in their environment. I try to respect that, even if I don’t understand it.
Nearly all religions have or have had militant aspects to them. Horrible, unthinkable, acts have been committed against people of different faiths in the name of the ‘true’ religion throughout the history of man. Tolerance generally comes at a high cost.
I, personally, think that religions and militancy have no place dwelling in the same place, and I find it hypocritical to say that one is killing in the name of religion. I say that knowing full well that my own religion has been one of the worst offenders in this regard (the Inquition and the Crusades come to mind). But we evolved and are no longer a religion of militancy. One might cite the example of Northern Ireland, but while the combatants fell along religious lines, that conflict was more political than it was truly religious.
Islam is nearly as old as Christianity, yet it has retained a good deal of its militancy. I am by no means an expert on the religion, but I suspect it has retained this character because so many of its believers have been culturally embattled for generations. I don’t know if they can reach tolerance until they attain stability, but I hope they can move in that direction. It is difficult to respect and understand a religion with such a violent public face to it.
All of this said with the caveat that not every member of any religion is a militant or extremist, nor has that ever been the case.
When I said that, I was both joking and completely serious.
Joking aside, any religion is a toolkit. For various reasons, at this point in my life, RC is the toolkit that best helps me to become the person I aspire to be. It’s a clearly imperfect organization and I wrestle with it frequently, but that’s where I am right now.
I don’t expect everyone’s toolkit to be the same. People are very different.
I feel the same way about religion as I do hockey. I don’t want to ban it, but I do wish it were taken far less seriously in the world. In a best case scenario it would fade away and only be practiced by a few people in frozen, rural parts of Canada.
I’m a “roll your own” / “homegrown spiritual understanding” kind of person. My attitude towards religions other than my own is therefore my attitude towards people other than myself who have any religious/spiritual understandings, and divides up as follows:
• I have more respect for people who have done their own seeking and inquiry rather than just soaked up stuff like a sponge, even when they are rather close-minded about any views other than their own
• I am generally wary of anyone whose views of other perspectives are intolerant of dissent, but it makes a difference whether they’re passively intolerant (i.e., they’re absolutely sure you’re wrong and they’ll never spend one blip considering your perspective, but they don’t go out of their way to see you officially mistreated for being wrong-headed) or actively intolerant (they want to shove their beliefs down your throat or put infidels like you on a leaky raft and push you out into the northern Atlantic or something)
• I like it when people share their perspective if they can mostly explain it descriptively (“this is how I see it”) rather than prescriptively (“this is how it IS and therefore how YOU need to see it”). I’ll engage with the latter if they’ll acknowledge that I have my own way of seeing it and that I’m as entitled to speak about mine as they are to speak about theirs; otherwise, no.
My views about God are built on a foundation of personal faith. I can’t prove it to you. I don’t need to prove it to you.
I also believe that most people that claim to follow a particular religion don’t know why. They follow it because they were raised in that particular faith or belief. And most of those people are benign in how they interact with the world. I say benign in that, they actually try and do good from the point of view of the faith, and at worst try and do no harm. )i.e. golden rule, love your neighbor, good Samaritan, etc.)
But, there are some people that have adopted a faith and belief system that requires them to conform others to their own belief system. This can come in the mild form of not baking a cake for you, a sinner. All the way to the horrific storming a theater and murdering 100+ people as a demonstration of your lack of faith and their full faith in Allah.
My point is that it is not fair to lump all religions in one basket or even all people of a certain belief system into one basket.
Where one’s actions taken based upon their beliefs violates societies’ general codes and laws, then society as a whole must come together to confront their actions and hold them accountable for them. They don’t get a pass just because their actions are driven by their religion.
As a theist, this is very much how I feel. That is, either God (or creator or whatever you want to call it) exists, and many of us are just experiencing some various limited projections of God, or it doesn’t. Obviously, I’ve chosen the set of beliefs I have because they match my experience, but I’m fully aware that my experiences are not universal and it is, in fact, expected that various people would have experiences that are as far as even contradictory to my own. As such, I don’t claim that what I believe about the nature of God is universal, or even absolutely consistent with my own experiences, only that they are my best understanding.
What bugs me is when people of whatever faith, while at one time confessing to believe that God is beyond our understanding, also stating that their understanding, their set of beliefs are the most correct. I really feel that Plato’s allegory of the cave illustrates this idea well.
I think the best way to understand this is to put it in a realm where, as a non-believer, you do have experience. Speaking for myself, I’m extraordinarily passionate about music. I’ll travel to see shows, spend tons of money on albums and merchandise, spend time playing my piano, composing, whatever.
When I relate this to other people, some get it and are similarly passionate about music. In this group, there are some who enjoy very much, but seldom exactly, the same type of music. Then there are those who enjoy a different set but we can share a mutual respect for eachother’s differing taste. Then there’s that small minority who are obsessed with some microgenre and thing that anything else is just crap. I see these as relateable to people of similar faiths, people of different faiths that have respect, and those fanatics who are aggressive or even violent about their faiths.
There’s also other groups where they like music, they just don’t live and breathe it. Maybe they have it on in the background and buy a few albums, but they focus more energy elsewhere. This is probably where most people are, equivalent to your more casual religious people.
Then there’s people, who just don’t get it. Some of them pretend they like music, maybe because they see everyone else does and they don’t want to be seen as weird. Or maybe they think they just don’t get it. Some have even just plain told me they just don’t like music and mostly find it annoying and would rather have silence and read a book or whatever. These people, especially, often find it difficult to relate to how I can put so much time and energy into music.
And maybe for you, music isn’t like this, but surely there’s something you are passionate about that’s informed by something quintessentially experiential and subjective. Maybe movies or books or sports or wine or painting or dancing or gardening. But the key thing is whatever it is, there just isn’t a way to share that aspect of how it makes you feel.
I’m not going to defend that usage, but with relation to what I said above, I think what they really mean is that they’ve had a very real, at least to them, experience of the presence of God.
Just as I might hear a song and it really touches me and someone else not only feels nothing, but actively dislikes it. I’m left somewhat baffled how they don’t share the same experience I had for a moment until come to understand, again, that we just have different experiences of it. Maybe if I could share my experience, everyone would love the same music I do. But then again, if others could share theirs, maybe I’d have greater appreciation for the music they love that I currently don’t.
In the end, that’s really all we have to go off of for our belief, or non-belief, in God; it’s just too experiential to be anything else.
Even though I don’t believe in God (well, most of the time ;)), I love learning about religion - seriously, it’s one of the most fascinating lenses through which to view history. While I feel confident in saying the world would be better off without the extremists, I find religion in general to be a really beautiful, human thing.
Thanks for the effort. Seriously. But I don’t get the analogy. I like music A LOT. Currently jam at least 8 hrs a week on bluegrass bass. But there’s no way I’d say bluegrass is better or worse than any other style of music. Instead, there are simply personal preferences. Surely less significant than minor matters such as eternal salvation/damnation, no? Doesn’t it essentially demean the almighty to put his/her/it’s existence down to nothing more than personal preference?
Moreover, music of any style can be done well, or not so well. How do you say that about the exercise of religious belief?
But most important, there is something about music - and gardening, dance, painting, sports, wine, and books - that is undeniably real. You might not like that painting, but you can’t ignore that it exists, and that someone painted it. You might not like this music, but the air waves are undeniable.
Whereas for religion, you have to attempt to prove it through some secondary quality - the good will and fellowship of it’s practitioners, etc. It’s like someone getting all worked up over whether Santa’s coat is supposed to be red or green. Or whethe rpink unicorns are better than purple ones. It’s all made up. You can prefer one or the other, but it still is a preference about a fiction.
I have a friend named Joe, who has a friend named Sam who weighs 300 pounds and is an incredible Forty Niners fan, with season tickets and posters on his wall.
I have a friend named John who has a friend named Sam who weighs 150 and spends most of his time playing video games, and who has not watched a football game in 20 years.
I have a friend named Frank who has a friend named Sam who is a woman, tall and blonde, who loves to party.
I’m an agnostic atheist, most specifically. I don’t believe you can specifically know if god exists or not, so I find making a claim that “I know god(s) exist/don’t exist)” rather silly. But I don’t personally believe a god exists, something I accept on faith, without claiming to know the truth value of god.
I am extremely libertarian when it comes to private religious practice: I usually don’t much care. Of course, when people begin fusing religion with public policy, I oppose them with a certain degree of fanaticism. So perhaps I’m just a true believer in The Church of Separation of Church and State.
Atheist here that has read way too much Dawkins, Harris, Shermer, Boghosian, etc to see any display of overt religiosity as anything but some kind of delusional episode.
Faith tries to make factual claims about things that cannot be known, measured, or tested. I tend to see prayers as salves to ones own conscience rather than doing anything meaningful.
That said I jave nothing but respect for those who utilize religious structures to do tangible good. Your church goes out and cleans up trash on the highway, feeds the homeless, and otherwise participates in enhancing the community, awesome! Far too many churches are more like huge non profit country clubs than anything else and IMHO should be treated as country clubs not churches.
In Monty Python’s film, “The Life Of Brian”, large crowds of people begin to follow the main character around, seeking his wisdom with such reckless abandon that they’re really just chasing him through the desert. During the pursuit, he drops a gourd and his shoe.
Some people stop at each object and declare that theirs is the true relic and that only followers of their relic are true followers, that followers of the other relic are “false” and so forth.
It’s so patently obvious once you get fully to the outside of it all. It’s that transition that’s difficult - the getting to the objective viewpoint.
When religious folks ask me how I can have no feeling at all about their God, I ask them how many sacrifices they’ve made to Quetzalcoatl recently. It doesn’t take but a few moments for them to tell you that they are not agnostic about Quetzalcoatl. No, they are fully atheist about Quetzalcoatl. Everyone - everyone - is an atheist about one god or another.
Once you’re on the outside, it’s all gourds and shoes.
