Sort of. From the atheist point of view, however, you aren’t betting anything, because there isn’t anything to bet, and thus you gain (or lose) nothing. I.E. there is no God, I believe there is a God, I die and cease to exist without ever knowing I am wrong, or having any consequence. Or there is no God, I don’t believe in God, I die and cease to exist without ever knowing I was right. It’s Pascal’s wager.
I don’t know if there is a consensus, but there is also no consensus on whether or not God exists. So lack of consensus doesn’t necessarily prove anything.
The devil is in the details, dude-Your statement heavily implies that 80% of the world are worshiping the same deity in some sense, and that just ain’t so, Joe. This seems like part of the arrogance I described in post #18.
Means nothing, 93% of Americans think they they are in the top 50% for safe driving. And that’s for something that has associated evidence and can be empirically tested.
When it comes right down to it, all religion is based on faith. Faith is believing that something is true without any good evidence. When someone makes statements without evidence, that is arrogance. Therefore, religion is inherently arrogant.
However, I don’t think that people who believe the tenets and dogma of religion are necessarily arrogant in other areas of their lives. A lot can be said for the ability of the mind to compartmentalize ideas. I think that despite religious thinking, many people are perfectly reasonable, open to change, and often skeptical. While there are some who allow their entire lives to be defined by their religious thinking (and thus allow it to basically hijack their ability to think rationally), not everybody does this and I submit that even if a person was an atheist, they wouldn’t necessarily be someone who can think rationally.
In summary: Religion is inherently arrogant, but religious people can be rational. Non-religious people can also be arrogant and irrational.
People have wholly unrealistic beliefs about their driving ability even when such an ability can be empirically tested.
The fact that 80% of people have a belief in something as nebulous and intangible as a god is therefore not surprising nor unusual, nor is it evidence in the favour of a supernatural entity.
“A lot of people think X” is utterly useless other than as a statement of fact. It adds no evidential weight to the validity of x.
I don’t think it’s arrogant to decide what to believe for yourself. There are a lot of areas in life where we either can’t know or don’t have the bandwidth to find out, what is actually correct. See, for example, all the contradictory stuff out there about nutrition.
That is not to say that religion vs. atheism (or faith vs. science, or credulity vs. cynicism, or or or…) is the same kind of decision as deciding what to eat. On the other hand, (for example) there is at least some evidence that eating less red meat would be healthy for most people, those same people know that, and they continue to eat lots of meat anyway because they want to. A lot of people are convinced about a lot of things either without scientific evidence or in spite of it. There are probably a lot of ways to characterize this mindset, but I don’t think arrogance necessarily comes into it.
Where religious people are arrogant, of course, is when they want to prescribe my life for me, instead of being satisfied to govern their own lives. Even if they’re only tut-tutting in their mind, that is a kind of arrogance. I try not to do that to them, and I appreciate it when they likewise don’t do it to me.
pianodave was arguing the other way, that lack of consensus was evidence that God does not exist.
That’s just as invalid as saying that complete consensus would prove He does. Consensus does not logically change the odds that something is true (or false).
What the lack of consensus means to me is that any particular religious belief (including a belief that there is no God), while it may be true, is not obvious. Failure to hold that belief doesn’t mean that a person is mentally deficient or morally deficient. To think that it does is arrogance.
Good manners demands that we don’t mock the person but mocking the belief is absolutely fine, in fact it is part and parcel of a healthy society.
Trouble is, who gets to decide what is mockery? And why would someone believing in a god or gods automatically protect their beliefs from mockery?
Would you be so quick to defend the mockery of beliefs of people who have created their own personal gods? Or that a sportsman, politician or singer was a god? or someone that clung to an aztec, egyptian, greek, roman, old norse, pagan or aboriginal god? What about scientology? What about pretty much any set of supernatural quasi-religious beliefs on how the world is ordered?
None of the above are intrinsically more believable or sensible than the “classic” jdeo-christian and islamic gods. To me, those beliefs are all fair game for equal treatment.
It’s not that being about God should protect a belief from mockery. It’s that religious beliefs tend to be among those beliefs that are most deeply held, that people take most seriously. If you mock a belief that a person considers an essential part of them, it feels to them like you’re mocking the person. And if they hold that belief in common with other people they care about, it can feel like you’re mocking those other people.
Which is not to say that such beliefs shouldn’t ever be mocked; but you should be aware of what’s at stake when you do.
Another caveat is that, often, what happens is that people mock a strawman version of other people’s beliefs, either deliberately for the sake of mockery or because they don’t really understand those beliefs. This can be arrogance. Although to be fair, sometimes people who claim to hold a belief don’t really understand it either, or what they hold is actually a strawman version of the belief.
I have not the slightest shred of doubt that I hold views just as strongly and just as deeply as any random Catholic you pull off the street. Views that are central to my worldview and inform how I treat others, how I interpret the beginning and end of life and the universe. I’m sure you and most others on this board are the same.
Now if I and the random catholic were to enter into heated debate on any opposing views we may have I suspect that only one side would be accused of “mockery” regardless of how moderate the debate was. I think we all know that to be true and we surely know that there is no justification for such a double standard. Still, traditions die hard and we spent millennia incorporating our terrible first stabs (literally in some cases) at science and philosophy into everyday society and they are afforded an unwarranted deference simply by being old and “religious”.
Douglas Adams said it well.
Well quite, both ancient history and recent events are clear examples of what is at stake when religion is criticised, let alone “mocked” (again, I’m not entirely sure where the line is for that)
A very good point. It is lazy to attack a caricature of belief so it is always best to understand what beliefs a person actually holds. Again though, it seems as though asking people to explain which version of god they believe in? what are their powers? what evidence do you have for that? did Jesus really die? Were there really Jewish slaves in Egypt? etc. etc. that seems to often touch a nerve, as though it is mockery or offensive to even ask those questions in the first place. A wall of defense is put around the faith that wouldn’t be given to another subject of equal importance to a non-religious person.
