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Civility in Discourse: Mudslinging, Rhetoric, and the High Road
Posts
Not condescending at all. I have been aurally sensitive and easily bothered by people who act differently from me my entire life. People who are bad at whispering or people with weird, uncontrollable laughter make me sweat.
Anyway, I prefer if the other people around the campfire are concerned about the tribe's survival rather than appeasing some deity the existence of which is eternally hypothetical. I can respect religious freedom but I think it's a shame religion exists. I can do just fine without, and that means anyone can.
@lonelyahava Huh? Now my statements and my character are subject to labels without any specification as to which sentences were so deplorable.
Out of many, many problems with your theory here, the most obvious is probably that it assumes every religious person grew up that way. Which is simply not true.
Out of curiosity, and I truly mean no offense by this, you seem to have a persistent visualization of yourself as a superior, model human being. Is that an accurate description of your mindset? If so, most psychologists would find that troubling.
Claiming humans should act on what is observable in the empirically available world rather than worry about a realm that is by definition always hypothetical does not make me a self-proclaiming ubermensch.
Yeah, no one converts as an adult...
This sort of does, though.
People who arrive at different conclusions than you have about the world and how we should grapple with the unknown are not lesser people. Your way is not necessarily the best way for everyone, and believing it to be is not a quality trait. It means they're different from you, not weaker or dumber or worthy of less respect and decency.
Also, considering your earlier comments describing the physical difficulty you have relating to and spending time around people unlike yourself, I'd venture to say you aren't really doing just fine.
Fair enough, though in my defense I should point out that it wasn't your views on religion that prompted my observation. Lots of folks around here believe exactly what you say in that second paragraph, yet I wouldn't suggest the same thing about them.
I hope I haven't offended you, in any case.
I can do just fine without social security, medicare, civil rights, women's sufferage, or welfare. I guess we should get rid of them all because anyone else can do fine too.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Except those things have impact on your economic and legal situation in life, while religion is a firmly interior, psychological matter.
Also, people get strength and support from their religious communities. Things like treatment for addiction and sustenance from soup kitchens are also really important, and people support their religious insitutions so that these things can be provided because they believe in their religion.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
Wait, wait, wait. So you go on in here about how you would never ever engage in discussion with someone whose views you find deplorable and would rather mock and ridicule them. But when someone else finds your mindset deplorable you seem to expect them to engage you about it.
*brain explodes*
IOKIYA, man.
Now he isn't saying that atheism=religion, that's a bullshit argument. But what he is talking about is the part of the brain that makes humanity look for truth. Religion is bad when it keeps that small minority from accepting the truth about science and leads to their detriment or when religious people try to take control of the secular courts that are needed for a true democracy.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by 'firmly interior' when it comes to psychological matters. Do you not believe these matters have manifestation in the physical world? The way you've framed this seems to suggest the mind and thought as a separate realm outside of material concerns.
I wanted some precision as to why I was suddenly under suspicion of whatever tendency lonelyahava was applying to me. I can't really respond to contention otherwise.
I maintain that dismissing anti-secular politicians and their supporters by default is more sensible than dismissing me for stating religious beliefs are different from regular beliefs and also problematic when applied to real-world issues. See religious drugstore owners bawling about contraception. Basing ethics and morals on a realm closed to empiricism is inherently problematic, and makes impossible the sort of rational discourse that is asked of me.
The religious community's support is often conditional. Past Irish attitudes to women trying to separate from abusive husbands springs to mind. The secular, state-wide community's support is less imposing.
Also, could you elaborate on the other questions I've asked regarding your reasoning?
What, kungfuman's supposed analogy?
OK, I considered religion to not be critical, since one can do without it. Then, he affirmed that his not needing women's suffrage, for example, meant that other's could do without. But he wants suffrage for himself, on grounds of being human. And he might also do without civil rights, what with him being white.
People can do just fine, personally and psychologically, without religion. That is what I was talking about. If support from family and community hinges on their religious affiliation, then I am sorry their family and community is so shitty. Of course, that is one of the reasons I am very fond of government, since it allows people to escape conditional, tribal safety nets.
It's kind of silly of skfm to skip the whole part about these rights being extended because they are considered basic human freedoms by now. What I was talking about was need - human's obviously don't need religious beliefs. Religious freedom is a right, but I don't take the personal importance of it for granted and I don't think it is uncivil to consider religious thinking and reasoning to be different, and impossible to subject to the same scrutiny non-religious thinking and reasoning can be subjected to.
Never said it was true for everyone, all the time. But it is not an unavoidable aspect of human life, and I personally think it is mostly passed down as tradition from parent to child, and becomes psychologically important that way. Religions don't obtain adherents from any "merit" as attractive systems of morality, ethics, metaphysics, culture and interpersonal exploration/conscience.
The entirety of your argument depends on this one statement, and it is simply not true for some people at some times.
No, this;
I'm fairly certain the people involved in their community don't see it as 'shitty'. People apparently can do just fine with religion in terms of community, so I'm not sure what your argument even is here.
I'm going to have to dispute that, most if not all rational beliefs are just as fundamentally unfounded.
Firmly interior and personal in the sense that while religion can certainly be important if you need to stay with one affiliation to retain real-world social and economical support from a community, then there are implications, but if a person can do fine mentally and psychologically without religion, like me, then people can do just fine without it. If you are on some sort of dole that is conditional on your practicing a faith, then yes, there are material concerns.
As long as there is no conflict between their personal desires and pursuit of happiness and their religious community's demands, of course not. They might not think things are so tickety-boo if there is.
But at least they can be shown to be unfounded by the process of civil discourse. Religions are like ideologies that always have an escape plan out of that sort of scrutiny. This is why I mistrust libertarianism and it's constant recourse to metaphysics or visions of utopias/dystopias that might as well be metaphysical.
Do you have a point or an argument to discuss here? It seems you aren't professing anything beyond your dislike of religion. Which is fine, but so?
I dunno, I suspect that I'd have better luck convincing an average person that their understanding of religion is flawed than that their understanding of ontology is flawed. We take a lot on faith, and we often don't even realize it.
I don't know how we got here either, but don't try to pin this trajectory on me. I will happily abandon all discussion of religion if that's how people feel, and will return there only if it pertains to the matter of discussing things in a civil manner and when this is possible/preferable.
So, apparently my reaction flew right over your head. Again, you espouse the mockery and ridicule of those you disagree with, rather than discussion. Then, when confronted with the evidence that others find your views deplorable, you expect them to discuss it with you rather than to ridicule and mock you. Apparently you do not believe that you should be held to your own standard of conduct. I can only conclude, based on a number of your posts, that it is because you believe you are special and above everyone else. At least, that is how it comes off. And it's annoying.
What else can one do but dismiss what you're saying when you refuse to provide sufficient reasoning regarding your perspective on these matters?
Given that there are many people of faith on these boards (and I doubt any of them are rabidly anti-gay, anti-science or anti-women) it seems more productive to criticize the actual arguments/stances that you find disagreeable rather than mock a rather generic set of ideals that have obviously been internalized/rationalized in many different ways by many different people over the years.
You come off in posts as smugly superior, arrogant, and abrasive. And while I do enjoy discussing my religion and my beliefs with people of all sorts (I've willingly sat down with the Witnesses and Mormons who have come knocking all the time), any person who came across to me the way you have, would not get any time from me. You come across as being so very right and superior that obviously the rest of people are simple sheeps that just don't understand how right you are. And when they open their minds, they'll soon see that you're perfect and everybody should look at the world like you do. You're not being rude in terms of words, you're not hurling insults that would be censored on television, but your tone is mocking, abrasive, and cruel.
Now, I could be reading your posts in the wrong manner, lord knows it's difficult enough to tell tone on the internet, but if you were to say the same sentences that you have over and over again here to me in person, well, I very much doubt I'd continue the conversation with you.
You are technically being a civil debater in the words that you are choosing, but you are mocking people who think and/or feel differently than you, and that kind of attitude does not make for a very open discussion. On my part at least.
It wasn't necessarily meant as a personal attack on you, just my clumsy way of trying to say "this is somebody's behavior that I would not engage with in a discussion".
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
This a great example of how what is effective rhetorically is not necessarily what is true logically, and vice versa. I teach my students about formal logic and argumentation all the time, but remind them that the rhetorically strongest strategy is not necessarily the logically strongest argument.
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All I was saying is that you cannot make broad pronouncements of what people need based on nothing but your own experiences. I am not even religious, but I would never dismiss the value of faith like you have in this thread. Did you consider the possibility that other people may have more metaphysical unease than you, and that religion is something they need because the secular answers that work for you do not work for them? Put another way, just because you do not need religion because of your comparative wealth of certainty does not mean that others who are less certain in their beliefs about the world do not need it just as much as someone who is poor needs food.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson