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timothwc
New Member
16 Posts |
 Posted - 03/15/2008 : 05:08:58
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Since this board seems to be dominated by views of anything between outside observers of religion to the laymen level, hopefully I can inject insight into the mind of the Bible believer from a veteran, former staff-member point of view:
Ever wondered why deeply religious people seem to have unwavering views on most things, even positions that are borderline sociopathic, and sometimes to a point they are willing to convert others to their way of thinking?
In modern society, even non-religious people would agree that arrogance is something to be frowned upon. Most religions teach humility. However it seems lacking even in the most devout circles.
Most religious types would submit that they answer to no-one, except their god. Some of you should already see the problem: the definition of god is hotly disputed, even WITHIN religions. This allows people to project what they think god is like (usually what they're like) into the god concept, the same way people project their presidential ideals onto Barack Obama.
So when people say they only answer to god, what they really mean is that they only answer to themselves, allowing themselves to be as egotistical as possible under false religious motives. This is also why fundamentalists are so well-versed in their pet theology, yet lack basic human compassion and goodwill
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the_ignored
SFN Addict
2562 Posts |
Posted - 03/15/2008 : 08:11:34 [Permalink]
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Meh. I just thought that through their religious "experiences", that "feel-good" placebo feeling, that they got the believe that they for the first time in their life, are well and truly right about something. Though maybe there is something to that projection, I don't know. Many born-agains will say that "what they're like" became greatly changed after their conversion.
How true that is in most cases, I've no idea. This is a complicated subject, I believe, and not confined to just the religious. Some athiests probably are also like that, because they see themselves as having arrived at "the truth" due to their own figuring it out.
Though in this case, I'd say that the athiest is right, but in some cases, that attitude may still be there.
That attitude probably isn't even just confined to opinions about religion, either. |
>From: enuffenuff@fastmail.fm
(excerpt follows):
> I'm looking to teach these two bastards a lesson they'll never forget.
> Personal visit by mates of mine. No violence, just a wee little chat.
>
> **** has also committed more crimes than you can count with his
> incitement of hatred against a religion. That law came in about 2007
> much to ****'s ignorance. That is fact and his writing will become well
> know as well as him becoming a publicly known icon of hatred.
>
> Good luck with that fuckwit. And Reynold, fucking run, and don't stop.
> Disappear would be best as it was you who dared to attack me on my
> illness knowing nothing of the cause. You disgust me and you are top of
> the list boy. Again, no violence. Just regular reminders of who's there
> and visits to see you are behaving. Nothing scary in reality. But I'd
> still disappear if I was you.
What brought that on? this. Original posting here.
Another example of this guy's lunacy here. |
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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
Posted - 03/15/2008 : 08:12:22 [Permalink]
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I've always thought that as well. If god doesn't exist, and you claim to confer with god for all your problems, then all you're really doing is consulting yourself. It's amazing how god always ends up with a personality similar to the person praying. Think this occurs ever occurs to the religiously deluded? Nope. It's just proves how in tune to god's will they are.
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"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
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alleyes
New Member
6 Posts |
Posted - 03/16/2008 : 07:44:45 [Permalink]
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My own theory is that people have an innate need to figure out what is going on and what caused it. It is one of our most basic survival strategies. Based on what we figure out, we can predict what is going to happen next and position ourselves to benefit, or we can get ourselves out of harms way, or we can manipulate things to our own advantage. People who fail in these calculations often die in horrible ways they could have avoided had they figured out the chains of cause and effect properly.
In some areas the consequences of not having this figured out were so horrendous, people needed to feel they had it all figured out and that they were doing the right thing, even if they didn't have it all figured out, and the situation was beyond their control and completely unpredictable. Probably the insecurity of knowing they and their loved ones were sitting ducks waiting to get nailed, made them a bit crazy.
So people created the mythological faith based part of religions.
I think - but I'm not sure- that the emphasis on the mythological parts of a cultures religious beliefs might increase or decrease directly in proportion to how generally stressed out people were by devastating otherwise unpredictable and unmanageable surrounding circumstances.
The problem is, if your security depends on believing in something which isn't really real, and is just faith based, you aren't really very secure. I suspect the reaction to this deep seated insecurity is to try and force everyone to believe this same myth, in the hopes that if everyone believes it, it will then be more real, and provide more real security.
Probably this isn't so much self righteousness, as it is fear and muddy thinking posing as "having it all figured out", which comes across as self righteousness. |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 03/16/2008 : 09:42:02 [Permalink]
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We are all arrogant in our way, Ive met a thousand skeptics who were just as arrogant as believers, only problem is they seem worse cause theres 10 times as many of them.
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"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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alleyes
New Member
6 Posts |
Posted - 03/16/2008 : 10:03:03 [Permalink]
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I agree. I have frequently come across scientists making leaps of faith which they then hang on to with just as much arrogance as people with unproven religious beliefs. Probably for all the same reasons.
Scientists and skeptics tend to be more logical, but there is still that irrational tendency to want to reduce a very big world into a much more simplistic and managable explanation than the real world will actually fit into. |
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timothwc
New Member
16 Posts |
Posted - 03/16/2008 : 17:11:38 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by alleyes
I agree. I have frequently come across scientists making leaps of faith which they then hang on to with just as much arrogance as people with unproven religious beliefs. Probably for all the same reasons.
Scientists and skeptics tend to be more logical, but there is still that irrational tendency to want to reduce a very big world into a much more simplistic and managable explanation than the real world will actually fit into.
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sounds about right. too much pointing at the speck in somebody's eye when you have a log in your own |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 03/16/2008 : 22:25:14 [Permalink]
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alleyes said:
| I have frequently come across scientists making leaps of faith which they then hang on to with just as much arrogance as people with unproven religious beliefs. |
Name one.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 03/17/2008 : 03:34:38 [Permalink]
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| Dawkins? |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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Starman
SFN Regular
Sweden
1613 Posts |
 Posted - 03/17/2008 : 05:03:42 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by BigPapaSmurf
Dawkins?
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All right, I'll bite:
So BPS,which leaps of faith has Richard Dawkins held on to with just as much arrogance as people with unproven religious beliefs? |
"Any religion that makes a form of torture into an icon that they worship seems to me a pretty sick sort of religion quite honestly"
-- Terry Jones |
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marfknox
SFN Die Hard
USA
3739 Posts |
Posted - 03/17/2008 : 05:57:51 [Permalink]
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Richard Dawkins is pretty damn arrogant these days, which by itself isn't bad, except that he used to only be arrogant about biological facts which could be proven. Now he's just as arrogant about matters of social/political opinion and about his ideas about why religion and religious beliefs exist and whether they have any social value. He now stabs his former religious allies in the back and publically makes derogatory statements about their motivations. I won't say that these are "leaps of faith" in the same way that believing Jesus rose from the dead is a huge leap of faith, but he's definitely arrogant, and probably to a fault.
Daniel Dennet's book "Breaking The Spell" is a good book on the topic of why religion is so common in the first place, but explaining religious with science is still a very new thing and a lot of the current thought is fresh theory and hypothesis waiting to be better supported with more study, along with some speculation. |
"Too much certainty and clarity could lead to cruel intolerance" -Karen Armstrong
Check out my art store: http://www.marfknox.etsy.com
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Starman
SFN Regular
Sweden
1613 Posts |
Posted - 03/17/2008 : 06:28:34 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by marfknox
Richard Dawkins is pretty damn arrogant these days, which by itself isn't bad, except that he used to only be arrogant about biological facts which could be proven. Now he's just as arrogant about matters of social/political opinion and about his ideas about why religion and religious beliefs exist and whether they have any social value. He now stabs his former religious allies in the back and publically makes derogatory statements about their motivations. I won't say that these are "leaps of faith" in the same way that believing Jesus rose from the dead is a huge leap of faith, but he's definitely arrogant, and probably to a fault. |
Yes, and often when Dawkins is accused of arrogance it is by arrogant people who can't even be bother to read what he really says. I'm sure Dawkins is arrogant at times, most people are, but as an answer to this particular question his name is a poor choice.
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 03/17/2008 : 06:40:09 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Starman
Originally posted by BigPapaSmurf
Dawkins?
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All right, I'll bite:
So BPS,which leaps of faith has Richard Dawkins held on to with just as much arrogance as people with unproven religious beliefs?
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Strange, I dont recall saying anything like that, you commie pinko! Thats is what you were saying right?
I only said they act like jerks sometimes. |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 03/17/2008 : 06:49:31 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dude
alleyes said:| I have frequently come across scientists making leaps of faith which they then hang on to with just as much arrogance as people with unproven religious beliefs. |
Name one. |
Linus Pauling and his ridiculous notions about vitamin C being a cure-all.
Oliver Manuel's iron-Sun theory.
Whoever it was who thought that "the Brights" would make for a good meme.
Hoyle's ridicule of Big Bang theory.
Perhaps even Einstein's insistence that QM was the wrong way to go. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Starman
SFN Regular
Sweden
1613 Posts |
Posted - 03/17/2008 : 06:53:51 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by BigPapaSmurf
Strange, I dont recall saying anything like that, you commie pinko! Thats is what you were saying right? |
Your previous post sure looks like a reply to the request posted by Dude.
If not, I have no problem.
| I only said they act like jerks sometimes. |
Indeed.
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 03/17/2008 : 07:01:33 [Permalink]
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It's all about control, isn't? And those in control, or who think that they are, or who are striving to be, feel privileged to display a sort of "better than thou" attitude toward others with impunity. That can hold with the skeptic as well as the blinded believer. I am guilty myself, even though I know fully and all too well, the very many times I've been dead wrong & downright stupid.
So I must ask: on these hallowed boards, do we not try to covert the heathen (of sorts); try to convince them that their woo-woo ideas are just that, and to come to our perfectly correct way of thinking? And do we, many of us, not sneer at the various religions and loudly and sometimes profanely abuse their leaders?
Let us replace the glass in our own house with something bulletproof before we chuck too many arrogance stones at even the most deserving of targets.
All about control.... I wrote a little essay a while back wherein I demonstrated the rigid & rather horrendous control many endoparasites exert over their hosts. Thus do philosophical movements of any sort attempt to parasitize the intellect and control it's thought. From there, it's: "I'm in & you ain't, chump, so get with the freakin' program!"
But on the other hand, is it possible to not be arrogant under these circumstances?
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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Why religious people are so arrogant
