My partner Em has done much less research into religions than I have, because she doesn’t value argument the same way I do, yet she certainly is as strong an atheist as I am despite that fact, and she does make good points if pushed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that she couldn’t argue the point, she doesn’t want to, and that’s a different thing. I thought it might be interesting to look at why some people don’t need to delve into a thing to dismiss it, especially concerning a subject where early schooling in particular performs such a strong government supported campaign of operand conditioning on the young mind. We all learn religion as if it is a fact rather than a belief or hope, we are told the mistruth that our societal laws and moral values are derived from scripture, and we are taught to sing songs of praise to an all-powerful ethereal being before we have even the vaguest notion of what algebra or trigonometry is.
Operand conditioning, the term I used previously, is a perfect placeholder for this school and church based, societally mass accepted, process. It has always proved difficult to apply reason in removing anything, especially a thing as horrible as a religion based perspective, which has been so deeply ingrained in formative years that its impression on neural pathways is set in stone. I suppose it would be like un-brainwashing someone that had Stockholm syndrome and had flipped from being an captive to fighting for the folks that captured them.
Watch enough news or documentaries and you’ll find high numbers of people that hold very passionate and strong beliefs toward the supposed truths of social movements, conflicts, empires, races, churches, therapies etc. So far I have heard their arguments over and again and I remain yet to be convinced because I see limited thought on their behalf to arrive at the skewed ideals they often hold so dear and arrange their lives around. In philosophical terms we might think that any number of conclusions might be extrapolated from a premise, even a false one, but if the premise doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, i.e. if its validity is accepted on faith alone or it is because of conditioning only, then all that follows is, by implication, invalidated. It would then be a mistake to build upon this invalid information, so we tended not to previously.
In modernity however, there is a lot of ground given in the fight against spurious arguments – that a man is a woman if he wishes to be, that there exist such a thing as a religion of peace, that when the Russians and Chinese are doing the same sort of espionage that we do they are acting immorally (and we aren’t), that the science of medicine is some sort of democracy that bends to the feelings of non-doctors, that our politicians are not just trying to rob us, that the BBC is unbiased (see middle east reporting on that one). There is a dangerous balancing of opinion and fact that should cause us all to be just as sceptical as my Em.
Western societies are not built upon beliefs that cannot be assumed to be justified or reasoned (the ones that all agree with). For instance you will not find a person in the USA that believes that they personally should be without the right to be free. This is of course also based on belief you might say, because there is no higher power to verify if it is indeed the correct way to build the good city. Yet it differs from what churches teach, where all are subjects of a deity, love of the deity is mandatory, innate human feelings are an affront to the deity, and the pursuit of knowledge is very much against the wishes of the deity. I have never met anyone who does not wish to be free, and likely neither have you. This alone makes religion a conflict between the self and the words of unfreedom written in a book.
Let’s play a game where we test the harm that arises concerning a belief, I mean the implications involved. Say I was to propose that all left handed ginger haired persons held no ability to play the drums (this is of course not true), and we were to build a society of rules that took my suggestion as a truth that all are compelled by their prior conditioning to accept. Ginger baker, a ginger haired man (also left handed) who played the drums for Cream, would not then ever express an interest in playing the drums because he and most others would believe that he would not be able to. If he did wish to play drums, we could imagine, given my previous postulate, that society might actively prevent it. Belief is not separate to acts, it has implications to people and their lives because it makes rules for those of faith to not only live by but to try to make everyone live by, hence the teaching of those rules in early development.
Acceptance of faith based rules, and make no mistake there are few faiths that do not have doctrines, hobble human freedoms. They do this in the mind and in the physical world also. Historically, churches are a resource made of resources like stone, wood, glass and slate, they are always among the most lavish of buildings in their area. Normally the people lived poorly, but the preachers lived for free, lived well, and lived off the people as they exchanged bronze aged book wisdom for food, firewood, and juicy tales of lustful sin to fuel whatever way they found to quell their innate human hormonal fire later on. By allocating resources and labour to the construction of religious buildings, and these resources being finite in number or time, our ancestors prioritised those endeavours over and above the love, care, and charity for fellow man. People knew harsh times, many were sick or starving, while the strong backs and wealth of a village was focussed on the shrine to a deity they had no immediate and reasonable way to prove the existence of. Often they were sent to conflict on behalf of that deity also.
As you can see I am a sceptic, I do not believe that religion is anything but a form of control embedded in persons using conditioning while they are too weak to resist it. Em is just as sceptical as I am, and according to our own memories we have both been that way since we were youngsters. Sitting in assembly while some vicar talked about a boat with all the creatures on, thinking “what is this bullshit, two of all the creatures, how big is the boat?”, and “why are there no dinosaurs in the bible?”, or “a god became a mortal so that he could sacrifice himself to himself because a guy he made imperfect ate an apple, what the fuck??”
I watched an online documentary about christian fundamental white supremacists in the USA who believe of themselves that they are warriors for their deity and have the right to transcend the laws of man to do their task of purging the country of all its sin. This sort of fundamentalism and totalitarianism, derived from a book, those heavily armed christians would not accept from islamists acting out the proscriptions of their particular book. Destroy democracy to preserve the democracy they want that is based on theocracy, so no democracy at all. More bullshit, where the belief on their part is that democracy itself, the term as understood by most people for the last 25 centuries to mean rule of the majority, they wish to be reimagined as their minor movement then ruling over all persons based on their particular misunderstandings of their church’s interpretation of a badly many times rewritten book.
To accept this in adulthood, to become a follower or an evangelist of it, is a ferocious and almost unforgivable stupidity, if I was a bit less democratically minded myself I would maybe suggest that Richard Dawkins idea of Brights might be a better way to configure the voting system than to let these types cast a ballot simply because they can demonstrate a basic understanding of language. They definitely haven’t grasped a basic understanding of reasoning, that much is abundantly clear. Plato was against democracy for this very reason, that the intellectuals would inevitably become ruled over by the feeble minded, Dawkins suggestion echoes this.
I’ve digressed into yet another rant about religion, I could do this every time I write, it’s a passion of mine to highlight bad thinking if I encounter it, and religion is the epitome of bad thinking, so the easiest target to pick. But let’s get back to the psychological question I started with. I’ll remind you… how come some people buy in then have to be reasoned out, whereas some people never buy in?
Em never bought in, she couldn’t tell you a single bible passage because she never absorbed them. This is her nature, that she is a sceptic, and it is one of the traits I like best about her. I find her need for veracity, even at a basic level in all things, quite impressive. That which is demonstrable and provable she accepts, that which is unfounded she simply rejects without feeling the need to give it any argument. Of course she is not seeking the dispute, so she won’t go after the daft things people say other than to respond that it isn’t her thing, or that she doesn’t believe what is being mooted, and that makes her wildly different to me. I will jump at the chance to destroy nonsense, I attempt to play the role of Socrates.
I have pals that believe in a higher power, the bullshit story that they learned in their youth, and although they don’t practice this actively I suspect they secretly hope for an epiphany some day, or they need to get youth and young manhood out of their system, build and buy, exercise their anger, show prejudices, establish a solid financial base and a secure future, then they will embrace the twaddle so as to inherit the prizes offered. People turn to churches in older age because humans naturally fear nothingness, and I fear it too, but I wish to live unshackled in the now without that dogmatic retardation of my cognitive functions, and I’ll think what I think as long as there is no proof to the contrary.
I think there are two types of mind, the seeker and the sceptic. The seeker has a wish mind, they need an answer that stops their questioning, that answer needs no reasoning if it fulfils the need for just having one. The other, the sceptic focuses on first getting the question right, and since we haven’t done that successfully yet there is no point in accepting any answer.
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