Sensitivity towards religion.

[Omega-185]

Ok, me and a bunch of my friends were listening to George Carlin's "You're all Diseased", which anyone who has ever listened to George Carlin would know is an hour long rant about a bunch of topics. After laughing our asses of at listening him rant about Airport security, germ phobia, people believing in angles, the English language even a part about how protecting children from danger is pathetic we came to the part about people who are full of shit. One of the main groups he listed as being full of shit is priests for the obvious reasons. George Carlin went on ranting about priests have actually managed to convinced people that there is an invisible man in the sky who has ten rules that he wants you to follow and he needs money. At that point one of my friends who had been laughing at every thing else George Carling said suddenly got quite serious and started going on about how cynical George Carlin is.

The thing is my friend is very logical and scientifically minded person that I know. He is a Christian but not a practising one.

My question is: Why do some people who behave rational most of the time suddenly start acting irrationally when religion gets involved? And why do they think that people shouldn't joke about religion when a bunch of equally distasteful jokes on other subjects are fine?

[General Zod]

This is very simple to explain in one word. It's called hypocrisy.

[Pezzoni]

Because it's religion!

Douglas Adams spoke about this at one point:

Now, the invention of the scientific method is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that. It has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, “Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? — because you’re not!” If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says “I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday,” you say, “I respect that.”

The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking “Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?” But I wouldn’t have thought, “Maybe there’s somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics,” when I was making the other points. I just think, “Fine, we have different opinions.” But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say “No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief but no, we respect it.”

Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows — but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe... no, that’s holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we’ve just got used to doing so? There’s no other reason at all, it’s just one of those things that crept into being, and once that loop gets going it’s very, very powerful. So, we are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.

[Coyote]

The thing is my friend is very logical and scientifically minded person that I know. He is a Christian but not a practising one.

My question is: Why do some people who behave rational most of the time suddenly start acting irrationally when religion gets involved? And why do they think that people shouldn't joke about religion when a bunch of equally distasteful jokes on other subjects are fine?

Sounds like your friend is fearful.

I am religious; I crack jokes about religion (mine and others) all the damn time. It is an activity that really does make no sense. There might have been a time when religion helped contribute to social order or something but nowadays it really is an indulgence (many here would say it is an indulgence that can no longer be afforded)...

A lot of religion today preys on people who are weak willed or vulnerable, needy. People who are needy or fearful of the future or of death or other big events cling to it and draw a line around it to preserve something that, perhaps, they think they lack.

Anyone who adheres to a philosophy (religion, political, social, etc) and cannot bear to hear criticism or cannot tolerate to have inconsistencies or silliness pointed out is weak in their beliefs.

[Darth Wong]

Because religion has a dirty secret: it's fucking stupid. None of its adherents want to admit that, and they're very defensive about it. Hell, even the Bible itself contains defensive jibberish about how Christians aren't too bright but they're wise in the ways of the Lord, not the ways of the world.

[SirNitram]

It's interesting to compare Adam's little spiel with the politics of America, especially between 2000-2005(It's getting better, but still isn't pleasant): For a nice long time, you couldn't challenge political points without getting shouted down in the same way religion was. Which really says so much about tribal worldview of the GOP.

[wolveraptor]

Is he a non-practicing Catholic? You could get him to lighten up by casually pointing out transubstantiation. Anthropophagy as a sacred ritual? I'd say that falls under the category of totally retarded.

[Vendetta]

Religion is a memeplex.

That is to says it is a group of memes that replicate themselves well in the presence of each other.

Part of that memeplex is geared towards defending against other memes that may take over the same vehicle. In the simplest form that can be expressed as "Thou shalt have no other god before me". In broader terms, successful memeplexes are the ones that can precondition their vehicle to reject any competing memes, whether they are other similar memeplexes or totally different structures which are incompatible with the survival of the first. When enough people who share a defensive memeplex get together (and get together they will, because tribalism and communal reinforcement are also part of the success of the memeplex), they will be directed to act to precondition society itself to aid the survival of the memeplex by stifling competing memes completely, rather than limiting the damage of exposure.

[Stark]

It's a pretty shoddy one - people who aren't stupid quickly throw off religion in a non-controlled environment. Indeed, 'gets over religion when free Y/N' is like a test for stupid.

[Superman]

Ok, me and a bunch of my friends were listening to George Carlin's "You're all Diseased", which anyone who has ever listened to George Carlin would know is an hour long rant about a bunch of topics. After laughing our asses of at listening him rant about Airport security, germ phobia, people believing in angles, the English language even a part about how protecting children from danger is pathetic we came to the part about people who are full of shit. One of the main groups he listed as being full of shit is priests for the obvious reasons. George Carlin went on ranting about priests have actually managed to convinced people that there is an invisible man in the sky who has ten rules that he wants you to follow and he needs money. At that point one of my friends who had been laughing at every thing else George Carling said suddenly got quite serious and started going on about how cynical George Carlin is.

The thing is my friend is very logical and scientifically minded person that I know. He is a Christian but not a practising one.

My question is: Why do some people who behave rational most of the time suddenly start acting irrationally when religion gets involved? And why do they think that people shouldn't joke about religion when a bunch of equally distasteful jokes on other subjects are fine?

There was a thread a while back where another member and I debated (kind of), whether religion is more akin to a symptom of something like a mental disorder. Collectively, a group of fundies very much demonstrates behaviors associated with what we now call a Personality Disorder, Dissociative Disorder, Conversion Disorder, etc. They collectively isolate (home schooling, etc), demonstrate paranoid behaviors (distrust in the educational system, project persecution fantasies, science, etc) , go into self induced "altered" states, receive healing for perceived illnesses (very similar to Somatization disorder), have a need, or rather a drive, to control and manipulate, engage in "black and white" thinking (very similar to Narcissistic Personality Disorder), perform weekly, perhaps daily rituals (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), frequently abuse children as they themselves were abused (compulsions to repeat)... The list goes on and on.

What does this mean? Due to the high numbers and cultural acceptance (sort of), nothing... at least as far as they psychiatric community is concerned. However, I tend to see most religion sort of how Freud saw it; similar to a child-like neurosis.

Since a mental disorder is basically a collection a symptoms, I would very much like to see a study that could show the rates of things like anxiety, obsessional thoughts, addictions, etc., among church members, and then compare it to a more general population. I would even hypothesize that the rate would be higher, among fundies anyway, than occurrences among a non-fundie group.

In my experience, fundies are sort of like addicts; every single one of them I have come was abused as a child. What I mean is that they were neglected, beaten, sexually molested, had a "smothering mother" etc. Maybe this isn't the case for all of them, but I would say it covers the vast majority.