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.
The conflation of personal belief with objective reality.
When someone tells me they are religious, they are saying the voices in their heads are more important than the voices in their ears. They are saying the vision in their mind’s eye is more important than the vision in their eyeballs.
When a schizophrenic tells us they are going to listen to the voices in their head, we should be worried. We should be worried even if their voices are currently telling them to be an upstanding member of society, because we don’t know what those voices will be saying tomorrow.
I find the comparison between religion and schizophrenia to be a little over the top. There is a big difference between believing something that cannot be proven true, and having actual schizophrenic delusions.
Religious beliefs don’t inherently impair your ability to function. And clearly they have some emotional function or value given that peoples around the world created their own unique religions without fail.
I really don’t see why you care so much about what people believe as long as their beliefs aren’t hurting anyone else. You are creating a problem where there is none.
I would argue the former is the more worrying of the two. We all know not to trust the schizophrenic.
But religious people aren’t just saying “God Bless You” when we sneeze. They are telling us how to vote, whether to wear masks, vaccinate our children, shun our neighbors, annihilate nations, and they are doing this on the basis of entirely unsupported, yet strongly held personal belief.
Any suggestion that there isn’t a problem is demonstrably false, and your claim that I am creating the problem is gaslighting. I’m not going to waste a bunch of time pointing at a bunch of lesser religiously-supported evils to prove it. I’m just going to take them as read, and skip to the end: religious zealots fly planes into buildings.
Ah, so your problems with religion are actually problems with specific religious practices. Its almost like you should just hate those practices instead of directing your anger at a very broad concept.
Your justification for distrusting all religious people is a small minority of Christians and Muslims. Grow up and treat people like people
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.
I couldnt agree more. I have totally underestimated how nutty religious people truly are. I used to think Christians are good neighbours and boring law abiding citizens, but when push comes to shove and you really need them it turns out that they are just nutcases who are very adept at playing the good neighbour role. At least that has been my experience. I just can’t trust adults who believe in fairy tales anymore.
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I totally get what you’re saying, but that’s not at all what religion is. If someone is listening to voices in their head, they’re not religious. They’re just crazy. I know many religious people who do not “listen to voices in their head” and it’s my belief that you’ve had terrible encounters and experiences with people claiming to be religious. But to generalize is not a good thing. I’ve met very sane religious people that do not do the things you say, I think it’s unfair of you to make such a sweeping claim that anyone who claims to be religious is immediately a crazy person to you. That idea itself sounds crazy to me
I did not mean to claim religious people are “crazy.” What I described is “faith”, but without the virtuous connotations commonly ascribed to that concept.
Based on your comment, though, I would say I have accurately conveyed to you my state of mind upon hearing an individual proudly portray themselves as “religious” or “spiritual”. It is profoundly disturbing to hear someone readily admit a belief that their thoughts supersede reality.
To be fair, a large amount of Christians, including many at the church I used to attend in my younger days, will often recommend they “Ask God for advice” on big or troubling decisions or issues in their life, and those people will then say “God told me to do X” after they asked God for help.
So… I think there actually is a pretty fair amount of crazy religious types out there. The churches I’ve been to almost always had a big emphasis on getting to the point where you’re having a conversation with god, asking him for guidance, etc. I always interpreted that as being literal, and not a metaphor.