Religious types who absolve themselves of responsibility for their problems.

Great Debates
41

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
You’re correct, but it’s not just a matter of asking for help, but asking for required help - that is, the point is not just asking for aid, but admitting that you cannot do it alone, and that the help is required.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, but you aren’t extracting yourself from the process. As long as you are performing the task to the peak of your ability, you are taking personal responsibility. Having a physical addiction to a chemical is no different from having to move a rock that’s too heavy. Both are things that way down the body in a fashion that is too much for it to manage.

42

[QUOTE=mswas]
Yeah, but you aren’t extracting yourself from the process. As long as you are performing the task to the peak of your ability, you are taking personal responsibility. Having a physical addiction to a chemical is no different from having to move a rock that’s too heavy. Both are things that way down the body in a fashion that is too much for it to manage.
[/QUOTE]
But the point of it is that AA in their general method is to take the approach that the rock is too heavy to lift alone, rather than suggesting lifting it entirely by oneself. The idea is that personal responsibility cannot alone add up to the success - God is required. Likewise, those athletes or sportspeople who thank God for their success are saying that without God’s support, they would be incapable of it.

Like I said, I don’t think people who go to AA who agree with that don’t believe in personal responsibility, and likewise I doubt there are many Christians who would renounce it entirely (well, perhaps prosperity theologians, but they’re pretty thin on the ground). I’m just saying that there are many different ideas of what personal responsibility entails; is what people achieve solely due to God? Partially? Not at all? Is God’s aid required to succeed, or can we do so by ourselves? There’s enough differentiation in ideas there that I really don’t think assuming the vast majority of Christians agree with you is such a basic premise.

43

I think that the vast majority of Christians believe in the notion of personal responsibility. How that is defined is open to some interpretation, but some variation on the theme I think is a pretty basic premise. One of the problems here is that we strive so hard to avoid a ‘No True Scotsman’ idea that we don’t allow for the intellectual tradition having any validity whatsoever.

44

I have always liked that joke (and all the variations) about the guy sitting on his roof during a massive flood and turning away all of the rescue boats, saying that God will save him. Then, after he dies and meets God, he asks why God didn’t save him, and God says that he sent several boats, and why didn’t he seize the many opportunities presented to him. That’s what I think of when I see false credits/blames attributed to God.

I especially find it odd that people get angry because God didn’t throw them a bone. There is a strange mentality that God is actually Superman and exists only to bail us out when things get bad. I don’t know of any actual religion that defines God(s) that way. At least not any religions that still exist.

If a person pitched a perfect game, wrote a best selling novel, composed a magnificent score, or painted a masterpiece, they should thank God for giving them hands and a heartbeat. Other than that, we humans are the architects of our own fate. I don’t really believe in divine intervention in the traditional sense. You exist, that’s your divine intervention.

I want to see an interview where God is thanked for a basic thing that we all have from God and take for granted:

“Congratulations, you just won an Oscar.”
“I’d like to thank my mom and dad for having had sex. Thanks to my wife for the emotional support and encouragement. And I’d like to thank God for giving me an ass. Can you imagine going through life with no ass? It would be hell, I’d have to have special chairs made, I would walk funny. Farting would always be silent and unexpected. Thank you, God, for this fine ass of mine. I am proud to have decided not to spend my life sitting on it, which is why I was able to work so hard to earn this honor, thanks me!”

45

[QUOTE=Charger]
If a person pitched a perfect game, wrote a best selling novel, composed a magnificent score, or painted a masterpiece, they should thank God for giving them hands and a heartbeat. Other than that, we humans are the architects of our own fate. I don’t really believe in divine intervention in the traditional sense. You exist, that’s your divine intervention.
[/QUOTE]

As an atheist, this comes damn close to something I can believe . . . well, except for the God part. :wink:

46

As someone who spent much time in church growing up, studied with the intent to be a pastor, and only left the church a year and a half ago… I think what mswas is representing is consistent with what I saw. I would like to add some stipulations to this:

There are religious Christians, spiritual Christians, and superstitious Christians - they tend to run in different circles, different churches, different Sunday schools. I’d submit that usually the last two don’t tend to go to church that often in the first place - though they will state they are Christian. It creates a biasing that I think shapes both sides of the argument here…

My church… was big on personal responsibility - in accordance with God’s will. Up to and including almost not “noticing” people of the gender(s) of your attraction. Largely due to the sermon on the mount.

Let’s be honest here. The penchant for projection, deferral of responsibility, and blaming are just part and parcel of human nature. Kids do it. Christians do it. Atheists do it. Moms do it. Husbands do it. We all do this. Sooner or later. Honesty with self is difficult.

I’m an atheist. Y’know what gets a bit old? The atheists telling the religious that atheists are more moral. And the inverse.

Morality is part of the brain. Not anything more. And it’s wholly subjective and situational. (see Double Effect) No one. No group. No anything has the market on morality.

Can’t we drop the pretenses long enough to see through the cloud of Us vs Them?

47

Ok, now that I’ve said that… I know my story was and is anecdotal. I also don’t think mswas will ever be able to prove to us the assertion of personal responsibility and Christianity.

In the same way that the gotcha-game is getting old the US election… this is unhelpful. The only thing that would help, imo, is to see that bit admitted as conjecture based on personal experience and a careful reading of the Bible (which it was). If it’s already been said, I apologize and I missed it.

48

[QUOTE=mswas]
I think that the vast majority of Christians believe in the notion of personal responsibility. How that is defined is open to some interpretation, but some variation on the theme I think is a pretty basic premise. One of the problems here is that we strive so hard to avoid a ‘No True Scotsman’ idea that we don’t allow for the intellectual tradition having any validity whatsoever.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think the “No True Scotsman” argument actually comes into play here at all; if we’re defining Christianity only as “that which Christians consider their religion”, then any form they believe it takes is valid. OTOH, it could be argued that Christianity describes a particular set of objective values and the like, and as such some who would consider themselves followers of Christianity aren’t; you could have problems with that argument there, but then you’d need to know in advance what the true Christianity is to compare with.

49

[QUOTE=begbert2]
I see this constantly from every religious person: thank God for the good things, (he gets a pass on the bad). Constantly. It annoys the heaven out of me - especially when they want to give God credit for my accomplishments.
[/QUOTE]
I had a very religious co-worker who did this. The funny thing is, I respected his general intellect and integrity and admired his ability to debate with me his religion and involvement in the church without ever proslytizing.

He said the same about the good stuff and about stopping bad stuff? “The Bible says God is powerful – it says there are things he can do not that he will do.”

50

To a degree, humility states that my ‘accomplishments’ are only what anybody else with similar experience and proclivities would’ve done. I don’t have so great an ego as to thing things wouldn’t happen without me. The cemeteries are filled with irreplaceable people.

You can give gods credit for that if you like. I don’t care. If I don’t care for the opinions of so many so-called gods, why should your opinion matter?

51

[QUOTE=Alessan]
Blaming anyone but yourself for your problems is not the sole province of the religious.
[/QUOTE]

That’s the first thought that entered my mind. I have seen many posts by non-Christians doing the very same thing. It is more of just a human thing.

52

[QUOTE=lekatt]
That’s the first thought that entered my mind. I have seen many posts by non-Christians doing the very same thing. It is more of just a human thing.
[/QUOTE]
True, but I’ve known (and know) many Christians who believe it’s part of their theology and, and such, inexplicably (other than simply saying it’s so) justifiable.

Also, mswas, and anyone else thinking of quoting scripture to bolster your argument, the question wasn’t what does the bible tell us about personal responsibility, it was how common is it for religious people to absolve themselves of personal responsibility…in my personal experience, pretty common.

53

[QUOTE=Onomatopoeia]
True, but I’ve known (and know) many Christians who believe it’s part of their theology and, and such, inexplicably (other than simply saying it’s so) justifiable.

Also, mswas, and anyone else thinking of quoting scripture to bolster your argument, the question wasn’t what does the bible tell us about personal responsibility, it was how common is it for religious people to absolve themselves of personal responsibility…in my personal experience, pretty common.
[/QUOTE]

Please respond to context in the future. Sometimes a discussion moves from discussing the OP directly, and moves into tangents related to the OP. Posting the bible quotes was to show that there is support for the idea that Christianity favors personal responsibility. I mean after all if we shouldn’t discuss topics like that then maybe this should have just been a pit rant complaining about people no?

Your experience is anecdotal. Do you have a cite that proves that religious people absolving themselves of personal responsibility is common? :stuck_out_tongue:

54

[QUOTE=Charger]
I have always liked that joke (and all the variations) about the guy sitting on his roof during a massive flood and turning away all of the rescue boats, saying that God will save him. Then, after he dies and meets God, he asks why God didn’t save him, and God says that he sent several boats, and why didn’t he seize the many opportunities presented to him. That’s what I think of when I see false credits/blames attributed to God.

I especially find it odd that people get angry because God didn’t throw them a bone. There is a strange mentality that God is actually Superman and exists only to bail us out when things get bad. I don’t know of any actual religion that defines God(s) that way. At least not any religions that still exist.

If a person pitched a perfect game, wrote a best selling novel, composed a magnificent score, or painted a masterpiece, they should thank God for giving them hands and a heartbeat. Other than that, we humans are the architects of our own fate. I don’t really believe in divine intervention in the traditional sense. You exist, that’s your divine intervention.

I want to see an interview where God is thanked for a basic thing that we all have from God and take for granted:

“Congratulations, you just won an Oscar.”
“I’d like to thank my mom and dad for having had sex. Thanks to my wife for the emotional support and encouragement. And I’d like to thank God for giving me an ass. Can you imagine going through life with no ass? It would be hell, I’d have to have special chairs made, I would walk funny. Farting would always be silent and unexpected. Thank you, God, for this fine ass of mine. I am proud to have decided not to spend my life sitting on it, which is why I was able to work so hard to earn this honor, thanks me!”
[/QUOTE]
That’s Jessica Alba delivering that Oscar speech right?

If so then I agree with your entire post. People make things too complicated. If we all focused on the basic instead of letting our egos inflate our visions then we could get a lot farther a lot faster with a lot more cooperation between the many diverse viewpoints within our society.

Taking personal responsibility is one of the big areas society could use some help with, even though it should be one of the easiest.

A cop on TV finds a bag of weed in someone’s car and they shout “That ain’t mine!”. You know what? Bullshit, that is yours. Just own up to it. You were man enough to buy it, man enough to use it, be man enough to admit it.

The next door neighbor beats his wife then goes to the local bar and says “It’s not my fault, the bitch just knows how to push my buttons.” Yes, yes it is your fault. No matter what somebody else does to you they do not control you. Neither you nor anyone else is a puppet on a string so grow up and admit your weaknesses so you can get some help.

Fat guy blames God and not his 3 can of Pringles dipped in mayonaise habit for being fat.

Drunk guy blames God and not his addiction to alcohol for his wife leaving him.

New mother blames God and not the two packs of Marlboro she smoked daily during pregnancy for her baby being premature and on a respirator.

The faithful follower looks to God for a “New” miracle instead of looking for the miracles of medicine He has already given us to heal his daughter. This is some sort of pre-blame, passing off future responsibility at the cost of remitting future credit.

My wife’s devout Babtist friend sleeps and sees nothing wrong with it because she has been told in church “Once saved, always saved”. This throws responsibility and blame completely out the window along with morality, trust, and anything else that could be passed off as decent.

In short, no it is not just religious types that absolve themselves of personal responsibility, but we do our fair share.

55

[QUOTE=nd_n8]
My wife’s devout Babtist friend sleeps and sees nothing wrong with it because she has been told in church “Once saved, always saved”. This throws responsibility and blame completely out the window along with morality, trust, and anything else that could be passed off as decent.
[/QUOTE]
Bah, I meant sleeps around, but tis the dangers of ranting and not previewing.

It’s certainly not my fault that I made the typo, nossir, not me.

56

What am I missing here? Christianity is big on personal responsibility? On which planet? The entire religion is premised on NOT taking personal responsibility. Tell me where I’m wrong here:

  1. Everyone sins, including christians
  2. The penalty for sinning is going to hell
  3. Christians don’t have to go to hell because Jesus served the punishment for them.

Did I get it right? (I hope I did; after 18 years of going to church 3 times a week and attending a fundamentalist christian grade school I better…)

How is that taking personal responsibility? Taking personal responsibility would be saying “I sinned so I’m going to take the punishment and go to hell.” That’s personal responsibility. Letting Jesus pay the punishment for your sins is the opposite of taking personal responsibility. Unless, of course, you’re intellectually dishonest enough to simply make up a new definition of the term “personal responsibility.” The mental gymnastics that must be involved in somehow making yourself believe that dumping the responsibility for your sins onto Jesus is “taking personal responsibility” are difficult for me to even comprehend.

57

[QUOTE=Don’t Call Me Shirley]
What am I missing here? Christianity is big on personal responsibility? On which planet? The entire religion is premised on NOT taking personal responsibility. Tell me where I’m wrong here:

  1. Everyone sins, including christians
  2. The penalty for sinning is going to hell
  3. Christians don’t have to go to hell because Jesus served the punishment for them.

Did I get it right? (I hope I did; after 18 years of going to church 3 times a week and attending a fundamentalist christian grade school I better…)

How is that taking personal responsibility? Taking personal responsibility would be saying “I sinned so I’m going to take the punishment and go to hell.” That’s personal responsibility. Letting Jesus pay the punishment for your sins is the opposite of taking personal responsibility. Unless, of course, you’re intellectually dishonest enough to simply make up a new definition of the term “personal responsibility.” The mental gymnastics that must be involved in somehow making yourself believe that dumping the responsibility for your sins onto Jesus is “taking personal responsibility” are difficult for me to even comprehend.
[/QUOTE]

You have to show that you understand that you sinned, and that what you did was wrong in order to be saved.

58

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
You can find Christians who are “big on personal responsibility”. You can find ones that think that a priest can absolve them of sin. Or that saying the right ritual absolves them. Or who believe in predestination/Original Sin, both of which are antithetical to personal responsibility. And so on.
[/QUOTE]

I’d like to go back to this point.

The irony, Der Trihs, is that those who actually believe in all of these things believe very strongly in personal responsibility. A priest can absolve me of sin: in order to do this I must own up my sins and accept that I am the sort of man who did them. And the right ritual does cleanse me, if I follow it faithfully and honestly. I won’t mention the predestination crowd, except to say they do believe in personal responsibility, in one fo the strangest and most impenetrable theologies I’ve encountered.

It’s the ones who don’t really believe in anything who are the problem. The fact is that you cannot judge a religion by people who blab randomly, because in point of fact most of them have only the slightest idea of what they are discussing. The men mentioned in the OP? Let’s be serious now: odds are that he’s probably never seriously thought about religion in his life. He may be believe, albeit in a childlike way. But his understanding is meager.*

*In this case, he’s actually right. God did let him get fat. probably didn’t particularly care that much, either.I doubt God particualrly wanted him to get that fat, but the big G is unlikely to stop it. That said, stranger things have happened and God sometimes does things for His own reasons, which we understand later or not at all. This, however… is probably not one of them.

Now, God can accept that, though I think it’s quite inappropriate for adults. I think it’s a bad thing to do, however. Some people who go through life childlike ideas of God and religion wind up leaving because… they are dissatisfied with them. And having never bothered to educate themselves, they conclude that religion is childlike.

This, of course, ignores and even insults the many poets and thinkers and doers who spent a great effort coming to understand and share the . Too many people believe that religion is something that you study in Sunday School before you hit 13. If that’s all you are suited for in this life, very well, it will do. Butif you are capable of questioning and understanding more, you deserve to learn it. And you may have to spend some effort finding sources.

Don’t Call Me Shirley, and I’m not trying to put the hate on you, you’ve just posted a child’s version of Christianity. In fact, I’ve seen numerous children who could do better. if you asked even a child, he or she would tell you that Christianity tells us NOT to sin, to be honest, and to own up to our faults. But never that Jesus just lets us off. In fact, I don’t even know of any Christians** who actually believe that no one outside us can reach Heaven - which is any case merely being Christian does not guarrantee salvation. Christianity is, if you will, a path, not a destination.

**I supposed you could give the Westboro Baptist Church here. But let’s face it, they say everybody is going to hell.

59

Religion is used as a justification for bad things, irresponsible things, harmful things, even evil things. Atheists have tools to justify bad things, too.

What we have here is a confirmation bias. You know you don’t like something, and you see an example of that, the example sticks out like a sore thumb even when among equally egregious wrongdoing.

I’d say, about as common as for other people. In fact, I’d say less frequently. But that’s my confirmation bias: I believe religion, on the whole, improves people. I don’t have objective data to back up that belief, though, nor to argue against a belief that religion causes people to abdicate responsibility.

But this thread brings up another issue: what is meant by “personal responsibility”?

I don’t mean to pick on Reverent Threshold, but I think this quote exemplifies how personal responsibility has been understood in this thread: that being personally responsible means believing that one’s choices cause the consequences complained of or celebrated. In this case, participating in AA is contrary to personal responsibility because the cause of sobriety is attributed to God, not to self. I disagree entirely with this interpretation of personal responsibility.

A better understanding of personal responsibility: behavior causes consequences. Even if one believes that they give up “responsibility” over their habitual over-consumption of alcohol, their behavior is about finding a way to not let alcohol ruin the rest of their life. If giving it up to God means being sober, then giving it up to God is a personally-responsible act.

Evaluating behavior requires considering beliefs, but does not judge those beliefs, just asks whether the beliefs support the behavior. Here I refer to mswas’ quotation of scripture and I argue that many religious types who absolve themselves of responsibility for their problems do not have religious beliefs that support their behavior. But maybe a person was sick on the day they taught Christianity in church and sincerely believes that everything that happens is God’s indomitable will or that they will be forgiven for any sin: don’t criticize their responsibility in following that belief, but their intelligence or responsibility in forming that belief. The obese man who adheres to a mayo-dipped-Pringles diet isn’t dieting irresponsibly if he believes that this is the next Atkins; rather, he is irresponsible in selecting a diet, or just is plain stupid. Yet the promiscuous Baptist may not be credible: perhaps a person cannot with integrity and intelligence believe that sins are acceptable because Christ was crucified, but rather ought to understand that forgiveness allows a person to change their behavior and become responsible.

Looking at the behavior of religious types who absolve themselves of responsibility for their problems, then, we see that it is not their beliefs that are at fault but their humanity.

60

[QUOTE=awk.pine]
I don’t mean to pick on Reverent Threshold, but I think this quote exemplifies how personal responsibility has been understood in this thread: that being personally responsible means believing that one’s choices cause the consequences complained of or celebrated. In this case, participating in AA is contrary to personal responsibility because the cause of sobriety is attributed to God, not to self. I disagree entirely with this interpretation of personal responsibility.
[/quote]
No worries, but actually I wasn’t saying that going to AA is contrary to personal responsibility; actually deciding to go to the meetings and seek help is certainly within the individual’s power, according to them. It’s the success at giving up the booze that is attributed by them to a higher power.

And so essentially we’re in agreement. The difference I think lies not in what is being done but rather what someone is capable of doing. A person who believes they cannot give up alcohol without a higher power must believe that there is a part of their behaviour overwhich they do not have the ability to control, and that they cede that responsibility to the higher power in question.

The act of giving up judgement (this is probably not the best term, but I can’t think of a good word right now) to a higher power is certainly an act of personal responsibility if you believe it’s required to help. But by acknowledging that you have no power over a certain aspect of yourself, you assume your overall personal responsibility to be lesser.

I’d say absolving responsibility to others is not something peculiar to religious people either, though; the type of person who would or would not think they need others/blame others/praise others is going to be the same whether or not they do so religiously.