I think, based on my observations, that it’s not really about “truth”, it’s about belonging. At a fundamental level (so to speak), it’s tribalism. Belief in the tribe’s version of “truth” is a requirement for membership, and the desire to belong is strong enough in many people that they will undergo all sorts of mental contortions–twisted logic, ignoring inconvenient facts, demonizing people with opposed viewpoints, and more–in order to comply with that requirement.
Think of it like a club. You endure hazing rituals, memorize a bunch of code phrases, and learn the secret handshake, so you can be in this club. Even if the stuff you’re doing is uncomfortable and looks silly to outsiders, you do it anyway, because it’s required in order to stay in the club. You’ve been in the club since you were a kid, and the club is where all your friends are. If you don’t follow the rules, you’ll have to leave, and your friends may not be your friends anymore. You’ll have to make new friends, and that’s risky–what if no one else likes you? What if there are bad people out there who will trick and hurt you, like the Grand Poobah of the club says? Who will you hang out with and talk about the game? Who will help you move?
So you put on the robe, tape the duck to your head, and plaster a smile on your face, because it’s all perfectly normal…in the club.
She couldn’t catch a mouse to save her life. Some birds were sitting on a fence and she whined at me like I was supposed to catch them for her. The birds laughed at her.
The answer is that they don’t do any of these things even for a second, and if they do, they’re punished emotionally by their church for demonstrating ‘doubt’. The more kind hearted feel sorry for those born into the wrong cultures (and might spare a moment to feel sad over all those ignorant heathens landing in hell), but the important idea is that their religion is either all true, or they have wasted their lives, and their community, family and emotional lives have to be abandoned. That’s a pretty strong motivator to stick with the party line.
But it’s only wrong and dumb and silly if you have not already built your world view, family structure and understanding of right and wrong around those ideas. This is one of the most powerful factors in why people - regardless of how ‘smart’ they might be - are compelled to stay attached to wrong ideas.
Hence, it was actually answering the question posed by the OP.
Most old Christian (Catholic) churches in Europe - and by old I’m talking VIIth to Xth century, back when Christendom really became a Thing - are actually built on older pagan necropolises.
No sense wasting perfectly serviceable holiness, is there ?
[QUOTE=Ukulele Ike]
I would worship the FUCK out of the Moon. I think it would be “goddess,” though. Everyone knows the Sun is a guy, the Moon is a chick.
[/QUOTE]
Tell that to the Japanese :). Amaterasu Oomikami, i.e. the Sun, is a chick. Tsukuyomi-no-mikoto, her brother the Moon, is a dude. And a bit of a violent shithead, which is why they don’t talk any more.
I get what you’re saying. And IRL I have a great deal of patience for individual cultural paradigms, however naïve or inaccurate. It’s my job, actually.
But here? Not so much. AFAIC, “Catholics worship Mary and nothing they can say will convince me otherwise” is in direct opposition to the cause of fighting ignorance.
Probably because I didn’t really give a shit who sang it. The song just popped into my head and I thought I would use it to make a little joke along the theme of the thread. The Ayatollah himself could have sang it and I still would have posted it.
So it’s OK for him (or her) to rhetorically attack other people’s religious views, which could include ridiculing them, but it’s not OK for us to do the same with someone’s ideas about other religions?
Believing that only you worship God (or whatever) in the right way is one thing. Having wrong ideas about other people’s religious beliefs or practices is another. The latter is just ignorance, and we’re here to fight that.
I think we might be talking at cross purposes. As an atheist with a religious background, the concept that two different religions can argue over whether they are worshipping “the same god” is a bewildering one, particularly when it’s the incorporeal J-C-M god. The only way to understand the question is to listen to how followers of those faiths discuss it, and the quote that I first referenced is a wonderful and honest example. Because religions each set their own ‘rules’ for how they understand their god as well as all other competing/‘false’ gods, it isn’t realistic to call these rules ‘wrong’ - ‘stupid’ might be ok, but not ‘wrong’.
Cross-purposes indeed. What’s wrong–as in factually incorrect–is the claim that Catholics worship Mary. As an atheist with a religious background, I find it pretty clear that they–as a body–do not.
