ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

lol sweden is incredibly un-heterogenuous, and, well, kinda swinging rightwards

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/7278532/Jews-leave-Swedish-city-after-sharp-rise-in-anti-Semitic-hate-crimes.html

Careful there - that story kind of suggests that heterogenity is causing the problem.

There were all sorts of myths and long-ingrained beliefs about what mattered in baseball, and the nerds were able to change that.

Eh, not until things like OPS, VORP, and Win Shares work their way into the box scores, they haven't, regardless of what Theo Epstein does from the front office. As far as your average baseball fan is concerned, Runs, Hits, RBI, HR and Errors are still pretty much all that matters.

I would suggest to anyone who hasn't read The Authoritarians, to do so, because a lot of terminology is getting tossed around, and I'm using it in the way that it is outlined in that book.

"People who just listen to whatever's on the radio" are not Right Wing Authoritarians, they're just people who haven't given it a great deal of thought.

RWA's are people who have a specific type of personality whereby they do not (maybe even can not) decide things for themselves, and rely on an authority to dictate what their morals, their mores, etc. are.

The "whatever's on the radio" majority are certainly capable of changing, depending on how general culture changes around them - if you switch their radio from country to pop, they'll complain about it a bit at first, but within a week or two will go around humming Lady Gaga as unthinkingly as they hummed Shania Twain.

RWA's are the highly literal people who have a Geir-like tenacity to stick to their authorities. If these people had been raised in an atheist state, they would go around burning Christians. The only way to change these people is to change the Authority, and that is *incredibly* difficult, once it has been established. (Hence why they will continue to defend repeatedly discredited authorities like Pat Robertson and GWB.) Changing the radio station will not affect these people at all - the only way to keep them in check is to make sure that the people *running* the radio station are not manipulative, evil or politically motivated.

I do recommend reading this book, if you want to understand why the religious right wing in the states has affected the political landscape in the way it has.

Basically, lots of people, you can change them if they're convinced enough that everyone else around them has changed, too. But a hardcore minority, you cannot change them, the only thing you can do is try to keep the people who would manipulate them away from positions of power.

Obviously, I do not explain this as well as Bob Altameyer, which is why you should read the book instead of my clumsy metaphors.

As to baseball, I simply do not care about it, I do not have the sport gene built into my personality, and no amount of geekery will *ever* convince me to care about baseball, or indeed, any sport at all. Chocolate and vanilla.

didn't vote, but i'm jewish (reformed), and do believe in god.

If these people had been raised in an atheist state, they would go around burning Christians.

yah, true believer syndrome. but people do ping-pong within that context...avowed "Satanists" to fundamentalist Christianity or whatever

RWA's are the highly literal people who have a Geir-like tenacity to stick to their authorities. If these people had been raised in an atheist state, they would go around burning Christians. The only way to change these people is to change the Authority, and that is *incredibly* difficult, once it has been established. (Hence why they will continue to defend repeatedly discredited authorities like Pat Robertson and GWB.) Changing the radio station will not affect these people at all - the only way to keep them in check is to make sure that the people *running* the radio station are not manipulative, evil or politically motivated.

People who follow Pat and GWB and have a Geir-like tenacity to stick to their authorities aren't some small minority.

Mr. Nunez's aside about baseball is the most interesting thing in this thread by a longshot.

i think india does religion really well

oh, you love jesus, allah, buddha, krishna, god? okay, we'll find a slot for you.

their philosophy is mind-bogglingly sophisticated.

they have a beautiful way of reconciling the divine as both absolute and in relative forms

they take an approach to realizing God that is, well, scientific. Yoga

saying "namaste" to somebody is a joke of sorts over "here", marking you as a hippie whatever. but there it's a real thing. watch manjula's cooking videos on youtube.

"As far as your average baseball fan is concerned, Runs, Hits, RBI, HR and Errors are still pretty much all that matters."
this is the sound of my crest falling! that's a bummer!

BTW I have no idea what those stats mean. I, too, am baseball-gene deficient, but Moneyball is still totally interesting from a pure nerd insurgency perspective. My understanding is that the other teams were forced to change their practices by A's sheer dollars-to-performance ratio, in the same way casinos had to change up blackjack after card-counters started taking them for $$$.

I'm not sure how you'd be able to directly apply lessons from one to the other. There's no world series of church. But I think where you can agree on certain goals, like reducing the number of abortions, a sabermetric mindset could convert more people to the "safe,legal,rare" approach by demonstrating its effectiveness over prohibition.

People say namaste over hear all the time when they say "one love!" or point a finger upwards as a greeting or parting gesture. I think we should all greet each other with "peace" IMO.

*here

People say namaste over hear all the time when they say "one love!" or point a finger upwards as a greeting or parting gesture. I think we should all greet each other with "peace" IMO.

ugh. that would drive me bananas.

not "peace" but the other thing. so basically i am a hypocrite. love the idea of loving the unwashed or washed masses but off the internet i am rock-solid misanthrope

People who follow Pat and GWB and have a Geir-like tenacity to stick to their authorities aren't some small minority.

That ones that cannot and will not change *are* the minority. There are studies and stats behind this and good academic research.

You need to separate those 40,000+ mega-churches out into the "what's on the radio" people and the strong Right Wing Authoritarians.

Because the "radio people" - who are actually statistically the majority - you will never make deep thinkers of them. But if you surround then with tolerant, liberal thinkers instead of just RWA's then you might make a tolerant liberal out of them.

The minority of strong RWA's, you will never make thinkers of them, you will never make liberals of them, but you *can* stop them from setting the radio station for the rest of their culture.

Ah, okay, I see what you're saying.

Still, being born and raised into a culture where their biggest influence is RWA FM means that they're virtually unchangeable at this point. They might not be that hardcore group, but by God they believe that gays are an abomination and that God's will is for them to make as much money as possible.

Having taught philosophy of religion for several years now at a large public university in a red US state, I've found that my students rarely have any clear idea of what they believe re. religion, even if they're active-ish in churches. We spend lots of time trying to get clearer on such matters, but it's evident that this clarity isn't particularly important for what religion does for them in their lives, which is give them an identity & a vague sense that they live an orderly life.

I think, as an atheist, this is part of the concern though. Perhaps most religious people don't believe in 100% of their church's doctrine, but how is that a good thing? There's something even more disturbing about the idea that people are supporting these anti-science, anti-gay, anti-rational power structures just out of a sort of lazy "what's on the radio" social impulse. Sure, there are billions of individual, nuanced personal interpretations of religion but I think that has less to do with any spirit of inquiry fostered by the church and more to do with the fact that very few people actually think this shit through.

^^^ Right. These people are often -- to belabor the analogy -- hitting the "scan" button over and over looking for that particular station, and become involved as listeners as a reaction to being "surround[ed] with tolerant, liberal thinkers." They don't have to be "RWAs" to be extremely frightened of and resistant to change, and the more they are surrounded by it, the more they react and lash out against it. That's what the whole damned "Culture Wars" are.

I mean, this is basically reducing people -- actual human beings -- to, I don't know, chameleons? Lemmings? Or something? "Oh, just move them from this cage here to that one there and they'll behave entirely differently!" That seems like a million times more condescending than anything atheists have posited ITT.

lol sweden is incredibly un-heterogenuous, and, well, kinda swinging rightwards

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/7278532/Jews-leave-Swedish-city-after-sharp-rise-in-anti-Semitic-hate-crimes.html

― paying AFFECTIONATE homage to his somewhat exaggerated teeth (history mayne), Sunday, 19 September 2010 18:16

point is, it's got further right to go than the us or uk in the first place. europe as a whole is moving to the right, unfortunately.

oh yeah, and those hate crimes were commited by religious people, not exactly a great way to back up your point. did you read the article?

Still, being born and raised into a culture where their biggest influence is RWA FM means that they're virtually unchangeable at this point.

No, this wasn't backed up by the evidence. These people were changeable when they were exposed to different viewpoints, and the stats backed that up - that going to big state universities and meeting people with different belief systems was enough to challenge their viewpoints. Even in middle age, encountering and getting to know *actual* gay people, for example, was one of the biggest forces for changing their minds.

And this isn't "move these lemmings from this cage to another" - it's the idea that lots and lots of people *do* respond to peer pressure, but that peer pressure can be used for good as well as evil. Exposing people to other *people* with other ideas, especially ideas about tolerance, *can* lead them to become more tolerant people themselves.

No, this wasn't backed up by the evidence. These people were changeable when they were exposed to different viewpoints, and the stats backed that up - that going to big state universities and meeting people with different belief systems was enough to challenge their viewpoints. Even in middle age, encountering and getting to know *actual* gay people, for example, was one of the biggest forces for changing their minds.

fair enough, but this has been a rarity in my experience.

Also I'm more interested in how churches are sources of power that affect the world socially and politically. The Tibetan Buddhist retreat is pretty much beside the point. It's like trying to have a discussion about the effects of WalMart and having someone constantly trying to change the subject to their local indie record store. I don't know, maybe that's valid, and any critique of corporate capitalism is made moot by the existence of cool mom and pop stores, but I kind of think not.

I mean, are Californians really lacking in gay people to know personally? It has the highest % gay population of any state. And yet they still managed to pass Prop. 8.

And there's also the cognitive dissonance that people are more than capable of. I've known more than one abortion clinic worker who has told me about women who were regular protesters, who later showed up to get an abortion for themselves or their daughters, and were right back out front screaming and protesting thereafter. Sometimes, even personal experience is not enough, let alone just knowing people.

I'm certainly not going to gainsay the evidence and statistics of a book I haven't read, but, like . . . as Americans, we live in the evidence. And either I'm just interpreting it wrong, or something is seriously awry.

Also I'm more interested in how churches are sources of power that affect the world socially and politically. The Tibetan Buddhist retreat is pretty much beside the point. It's like trying to have a discussion about the effects of WalMart and having someone constantly trying to change the subject to their local indie record store. I don't know, maybe that's valid, and any critique of corporate capitalism is made moot by the existence of cool mom and pop stores, but I kind of think not.

― wk, Sunday, 19 September 2010 19:20 (1 minute ago) Bookmark

^^^ this

I think those radio-listener people who are exposed to different lifestyles and ideas make them more tolerant, but their core beliefs mostly remain the same. As in, they meet gay people and are friends with them, and so they no longer think of all of them as hedonistic lost souls that deserve to burn in hell, but they still believe that marriage is a Christian institution and the gays should never be allowed to marry.

"are Californians really lacking in gay people to know personally"

haha yes. also, I don't think they have a good or cohesive program for winning over hearts and minds other than terrible pop-culture representations, which I must grudgingly admit, probably is a net gain, but still. but basically, if they can get the military issue resolved, everything else will probably take care of itself.

Here's a question for christians (with a lower-case 'c', if you will) who don't belong to a church and don't believe in any particular denomination. If people don't believe the Bible is literal, and don't believe in the dogma of the organized churches, why do they still consider themselves 'christian' at all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjsW_B4eZTc

xp

Possibly because they look to the lessons of Christ as a standard toward which they aspire? btw, all that Old Testament stuff isn't really christian, nor the later Pauline epistles, as you may have figured out.

xp I'm not a Christian but I'd expect because they're tapping into a super long tradition of non-organized expressions of Christianity (some strands of which don't require biblical literalism) and which are not somehow less authentically Christian just because they're not institutionalized.

crimes in HM's article not via 'religious ppl'

My second favorite thing in the Mormon edition of the King James Bible is this little footnote for Song of Solomon saying "this is not a divinely inspired book."

I'd consider myself culturally christian the same way non-observing jews might consider themselves culturally jewish. it's not something you can really disown (well I guess you could, but really, being culturally christian means all sorts of perks like not feeling awkward when people pray before meals, running for office and having a shot at winning, etc.. so why disown it?)

My second favorite thing in the Mormon edition of the King James Bible is this little footnote for Song of Solomon saying "this is not a divinely inspired book."p

ha, that's awesome

But if you're aware enough to realize that there's a degree of bullshit going on with the church and whatnot, why is it the Christian God that is the Creator and Ultimate Divine Being? How do you reconcile all the other cultures throughout history that never had any exposure to the Christian faith or at least not one that featured as the dominant cultural faith? If you can look at the development of the Christian religion and understand its cycles and variations, can't you see that it's unlikely that it's real? At least as the One True Faith?

I'd consider myself culturally christian the same way non-observing jews might consider themselves culturally jewish. it's not something you can really disown (well I guess you could, but really, being culturally christian means all sorts of perks like not feeling awkward when people pray before meals, running for office and having a shot at winning, etc.. so why disown it?)

plus sex being dirty, don't forget sex being dirty! rowr

Possibly because they look to the lessons of Christ as a standard toward which they aspire? btw, all that Old Testament stuff isn't really christian, nor the later Pauline epistles, as you may have figured out. Of course, but what's wrong with it as a handy guide to something you aspire to rather than, ya know, fact.

But if you're aware enough to realize that there's a degree of bullshit going on with the church and whatnot, why is it the Christian God that is the Creator and Ultimate Divine Being?

because they are wrong, duh. read your bible, jackass.

My first favorite thing in the Mormon edition of the King James Bible is a "Joseph Smith translation" adding some extra gore to Matthew 27:6:

6 And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself on a tree. And straightway he fell down, and his bowels gushed out, and he died.

Bowels gush out of this guy and they hang there . . .

That's what "divinely inspired" looks like, Solomon.

he's like Gus Van Sant. Like, it's understood that Norman Bates is sexually aroused by staring through the peephole watching the chick shower. We don't actually have to hear him jerking off to get it, ya know?

But if you're aware enough to realize that there's a degree of bullshit going on with the church and whatnot, why is it the Christian God that is the Creator and Ultimate Divine Being? How do you reconcile all the other cultures throughout history that never had any exposure to the Christian faith or at least not one that featured as the dominant cultural faith? If you can look at the development of the Christian religion and understand its cycles and variations, can't you see that it's unlikely that it's real? At least as the One True Faith?

I would agree with you except it doesn't work unless you believe in some kind of polytheistic religion of autonomous deities like the cartoon old-man-in-the-sky version of God, all competing against each other like in a political campaign. I think people that are really serious about their organized religion have a far more abstract concept of God. I mean "You shall have no other gods before me" doesn't mean the Christian God is number one in a lineup, but that he transcends all other subdeities and shit. Maybe.

As I recall, the One True Faith bullshit is based on a single offhand remark by Jesus to the effect that no man comes to the father but by me. In the mouth of a teacher who loved parable and metaphor, it isn't hard to interpret this in ways far different and less exclusive than the self-serving ways the church likes to interpet it.

It seems pretty obvious to me that several of the self-identified atheists posting here want desperately to confine religion to the publically professed doctrines of certain churches, because these doctrines are easy targets, whereas approaching religion as a personal faith requires them to discover what each person's religious faith actually is and to engage with it on its own terms. This is just not as fun or easy as slagging off on fundies.

I mean "You shall have no other gods before me" doesn't mean the Christian God is number one in a lineup, but that he transcends all other subdeities and shit. Maybe.

that still involves crude one-upmanship, though

just playing DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

but if it's abstract, why have any ties whatsoever to the christian faith? why not just an abstract concept that has no ties to any organized religion?

xpost

I mean "You shall have no other gods before me" doesn't mean the Christian God is number one in a lineup, but that he transcends all other subdeities and shit. Maybe.

Its pretty blatant in the Old Testament that other gods exist but that the god of the Israelites kicks all their asses.

Depends on which section of the OT you're talking about, but yeah -- monotheism developed after most of the OT was probably written