Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled.
Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.
“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.
Where did you get that idea? I don’t believe that is a valid conclusion raising from my arguments.
My “anger at a very broad concept” should have been a clue that those specific harmful practices I mentioned were exemplar, and not an exhaustive list. Further examples could be drawn from every organized religion, as well as from any and all individual “spiritual” beliefs.
No, my distrust of religious people is not based solely on those few examples of harm that I have presented, but on the underlying philosophical model, which could be characterized as a preference for hypothesization over experimentation. This is a “content of character” question, not a condemnation of specific religions.
This is an oversimplification of religion. There is a difference between someone’s religious beliefs, and how they approach logic in a real world situation. A religious person does not just always make a hypothesis and assume it to be true no matter what. They are capable of being normal functioning human beings and differentiating from fact and fiction outside of their religion. If they aren’t capable of this, then I agree its a problem. But its not a problem with religion, its a problem with the person.
So your problem is that people are believing things you disagree with because it gives them a sense of fulfillment and community without harming anyone else. It could not possibly be more clear that you are the problem.
And no, it is not gaslighting to point out why you are wrong about something. That’s a ridiculous tactic to avoid the tiniest bit of self reflection.
None of that arises from any part of my argument. Your stated conclusions are a product of your own mind and have nothing to do with anything I have said. Your argument is, thus, a strawman fallacy.
It is the fundamental basis of religion. The common denominator. The sine qua non: the component without which the philosophical model in question could not be reasonably described as religious.
Conceded.
The capability of distinguishing fact from fiction is meaningless in the circumstances where the individual deliberately intends to reject fact. In declaring themselves religious, they indicate that there are certain circumstances where they intend to do just that.
From what I can gather, it effectively is your argument. You dislike that people believe things that are not supported with evidence. I do not personally think it matters because they gain value from it and do not harm others in the process. What am I missing?
I can’t disagree with that, but I just don’t see why it matters so much. If they seriously gain that much value from believing something, then let them.
I have presented no arguments suggesting they are harmless. I have not accepted your premise that they cause no harm. Indeed, I have provided a few examples of common, relatively minor harms, as well as references to the 9/11 attacks as non-exhaustive examples.
You acknowledged these harms when you strawmanned my position. You can’t rationally claim that no such harms exist, when you have directly acknowledged they do.
We can disagree on the prevalence of such harms: you have indicated a belief they are rare, and I have refused to waste my time producing an exhaustive list.
You say your problem is that they believe things that are unsupported. Is that all, or do you dislike that because you think it leads to practices you don’t like?
Such things do of course exist, but they don’t constitute the dislike for all religion. Religious beliefs differ wildly and it makes little sense to denounce all of them because some cause problems.
Earlier you said that it wasn’t any specific practices that caused you to dislike religion. So, I focused on your problem just with the unsupported beliefs. Now you again bring up specific practices you don’t like.
I don’t understand what you are even trying to say at this point.
Faith is a disease. In the faithful who aren’t currently hurting anyone, the disease is dormant. They are still infected, and given the right set of circumstances, they will cause harm. A particular variety of the faithful were not putting people at risk, until COVID came around and their faithful infections came to be known as “antivax” and “antimask”.
Trying to stop the “specific practices” without inoculating against faith is like trying to stop the spread of typhoid without innoculating Mary Mallon against the disease. The faithful are the cause and carriers, regardless of whether they are currently showing symptoms.
This makes slightly more sense to me although it is painfully overdramatic.
I could make an argument that any person under the right set of circumstances will cause harm. As far as I am aware, a religious person is not any more of a ticking time bomb than anyone else.
Blaming religion for these problems without tackling the underlying psychological issues is not going to help in any meaningful way. You just spread more hate and make the world a worse place, instead of approaching the situation with the slightest bit of empathy.
I see secular groups acting exactly the same way religious groups youve mentioned do. Its not a characteristic of religion or the lack thereof, its a characteristic of mentally unhealthy people.
If you care so much about these problems, then recognize that the world is not so black and white that you can always find an idea to make your enemy no matter the circumstances. The way to fix these problems is not to alienate massive groups of people because you think they might become bad one day. That’s a childish close-minded world view that only perpetuates the things you claim to hate so much.
Indeed. However, for a faithless person, those circumstances must exist in objective reality. The faithful merely need to imagine the existence of their own triggers.
I do not concede that this is a symptom of mental illness. What I am talking about is an error in judgment, not a defect in the ability to reason.
I’m not sure what groups you are referring to. Do these groups “conflate personal belief with objective reality”? If so, I would likely have the same criticism.
Where did I claim to “hate” anything at all? I believe the strongest criticism I made was “distrust”. I did once use the word “anger” in a description of my position, but I was directly quoting you at the time. You have inserted quite a lot of emotive concepts on my behalf that I have not actually expressed. I will renew my claims of “strawmen” and “gaslighting”.