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Acting Irrationally: Stupid?
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Definitely not a bananaRegistered User regular
Definitely not a bananaRegistered User regular
In the hope to save another thread we'll keep this conversation going here. A couple quotes for why it's being had in the first place:
themightypuck wrote: »Atomic Ross wrote: »themightypuck wrote: »Atomic Ross wrote: »People choose to believe in their religions for an extremely wide variety of reasons. Saying that the reason people make this choice is due primarily to some sort of personality deficiency is, frankly, ignorant.
So you posit that there are rational, logical reasons to become religious? I'd like to hear them.
Easy. Convert or die in a fire. I bet a lot of people made that very rational choice over the course of history.
You're only supporting the position that all those old theologians were merely secular metaphysicists hiding from persecution.
But if that's all we can come up with, why don't we just agree religion is an irrational belief system?
That's a different argument. I think religion is an irrational belief system. I don't think it is irrational to believe irrational things. This gets pretty semantic pretty fast so suffice it to say, I think that most religious claims are unsupported by evidence but it does not follow from this that a person would be irrational to accept those claims if by accepting said claims that person was provided with safety, food, community, etc.
themightypuck wrote: »Atomic Ross wrote: »themightypuck wrote: »Crazy borderline autistic talk and not useful. In the real world, "emotionally disabled" and "stupid" mean something other than "belief in God."
Except if it were a religion based on vegetables or Pokemon, you'd be right there with me. Instead, since it's widespread mass stupidity/crippledness, apparently it gets a pass.
It doesn't get a pass. I just don't think it fits with the words you want to use to describe it. There are many people who believe in ghosts and gods who seem to be able to maintain healthy relationships and hold down jobs and whatnot. I prefer to use the word wrong to describe them.
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I didn't say it was. I specifically only referred to dogmatic philosophies and practices. You threw UU in there.
No, that's it.
A single irrational incident is understandable, as those are generally biological and pass quickly. Prolonged belief and practice in the irrational cannot, by definition, be rational.
Edit: My mistake, you did specify dogmatic. So new tact, how exactly is believing there's a god make a person any stupider than someone who says good bye to their pet before leaving?
I'm not sure UU is technically a religion. There's very little dogma and less emphasis on the importance of ritual and tradition. By design, it's amorphous and adaptive. It's a philosophy and a means for spiritual exploration; not so much a religion.
I think there's a difference in acting irrationally once in a while and having a large portion of your childhood and brain devoted to wiring you to act irrationally only about certain things. Anything from religion to phobias can cause someone to act irrationally, and I certainly wouldn't say someone with a bucket of phobias in their world view is less emotionally crippled than someone who tries to always think everything through using the empirical means available to them.
One is sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling, "lalalalalala!" Any time someone brings up something you cannot process because of a hard-wired response that does not mesh with reality.
The other is basically, "fuck man, I dunno why but I want a dill pickle!"
Wanting a dill pickle doesn't make you an idiot, having your eyes glaze over at the notion something you believe without evidence may or may not be true, or screaming in fear of an inanimate object out of phobia is a bit more life damaging.
Unless your intention is to redefine religion only as things Atomic Ross doesn't like, UU is, in fact, very much a religion.
Any belief system involving even a hint of the supernatural/spiritual is by definition a religion, anthropologically speaking.
I follow my religion (faith, whatever, gonna stop splitting hairs here to make it easier to write out) because it has provided a guideline on what it means to be a good person. My religion has taught me that you shouldn't steal from people, or kill them for that matter. Beyond the commandments, it's taught me that even those we don't like - to the point of calling them enemies - should be shown compassion in the end. If the enemy stumbles, don't let your heart know joy. If he hungers, let him eat.
Religion isn't all about condemning people and trying to convert others. I'm so fucking sorry you guys have had negative experiences with it. I apologize that the general representatives of religion act that way. If you're going to condemn all who follow religion as being like that, or doing so because they're 'stupid,' you're not doing much any better.
Yeah I said to go fuck yourselves and I'm sure someone is gonna rail on me for it. The benefit of life is that we can make up for our mistakes in a wide variety of contexts if we choose to.
Edit - And that benefit extends beyond religion.
Edit - And if I missed the point of the stuff in the OP I apologize. I saw shit about religion there and I've kinda had enough.
You're trying to equate a life-long following of baseless practices to basic human impulsive behavior, like deciding to go with the green beans instead of the mashed potatoes.
But if you wish to continue on with your head in the sand and not ever ask why it is you do things, please do. It's a free country, after all.
If someone discovers a metal rod in a field and touches it and finds that it is hot they would likely not touch it again. The reason why is because they have decided the rod is hot and that touching the rod will lead to injury. This is completely rational. However, looking at it from a different perspective which knows the true nature of the rod reveals something else. From this second perspective it is irrational not to touch the rod again because as it happens the rod only heats up during the day and this second perspective knows this fact. The person who would not touch the rod did not know this and acted rationally based upon the limited information they had. They are only guilty of bad logic, since it does not necessarily follow that the rod would be hot all the time. If they are not aware that their logic is flawed then they are still rational.
Agreed.
D&D is sometimes the stupidest damn part of these forums. Worse than the PAX subforum.
Humans are not meant to live in spartan efficiency. If some energy is spent (or wasted, whatever) venerating a fake god so that a person can sleep a little more comfortably at night, good.
EDIT: Oh, and for the record, as an anthropologist I find the assertion that I have no idea why I (or society at large) do what we do kind of hilarious.
No, the original thread was about dogmatic practices interfering with daily life. Please call me when the dogma of Unitarianism spills over into my world with all its nasty formless acceptance of everyone.
Yes, that's sarcasm.
Your beliefs are constructed when you're young, before you're really capable of thinking rationally or using reason to evaluate an idea - this is true of everyone and of almost every belief. Most lifestyle beliefs are the result of massive cultural pressures and reinforcement and the absence of any real counter-influence.
A person is certainly not stupid to hold a belief as a result of these pressures, because most and perhaps all beliefs are the result of the exact same thing. No one is strong enough to defeat those pressures. The very idea is incoherent, since every person simply is the intermingling of those pressures.
I am not an atheist because I am smarter than a religious person. I am an atheist because the influences in my life made me that way. For myself, my parents were atheists, and I was not exposed to any form of indoctrination. Any atheist who is raised religiously has simply constructed their values in a different way, because other influences - books, television shows, friends, incidental encounters, perhaps even a socially or biologically inherent element of their personality that pushed them to criticize the belief in which they are immersed - were stronger than the ones mandating religious belief.
Many moral beliefs, underlying beliefs about meaning, good/evil, the nature of reality or human beings, are irrational. We have them because we come to our beliefs through non-rational means. This has nothing to do with stupidity or intelligence.
So by dogmatic religious people are stupid and emotionally crippled what you actually meant was dogmatic and religious people that annoy Atomic Ross because of their beliefs are stupid and emotionally crippled .
I have OCD. It's pretty bad at times. My experience with OCD is this: It's irrational thought and irrational impulses that you specifically identify as irrational but cannot help feeling overwhelmingly like you have to act in this irrational manner.
So, religion aside, I am no stranger to irrational thought or behavior.
There IS a rationale, of course, for acting irrationally. Do I know if I don't tap this wall 17 times in a row that my mother won't die? It's utterly LUDICROUS, but you don't understand how very strong this impulse can be, how strongly - despairingly, despite knowing how goddamn stupid it seems - that this little thing you don't do might have grave repercussions, and this is especially true as a youngin' experiencing it. And still, in the end, as ludicrous as it is, you don't know.
Now I'm not trying to compare subscribing oneself to a religion as a mental disorder. There is some similarity, though, between OCD and fear of God, particularly if you've been raised to fear God. It just makes more sense to live that way. It makes more sense, sometimes, for me to perform these little rituals than fight them. Even though they are irrational. Completely and totally mind-bogglingly irrational.
I'm not sure any of this is relevant, I just thought I'd throw this out there to see if anyone had any thoughts.
Just like a blind man can still hear just fine, a religious zealot can probably work the till at Wal-Mart as good as anyone. You're being a pedant, and I feel purposefully so.
There are people without religion that come to these same conclusions all of the time. If you think faith is the only reason it's wrong to kill then does that mean those people who believe it on a moral level unconnected to any religion are more enlightened?
I mean, some people need a book of fables, other people actually have empathy?
edit:
I've got few problems with religion, but when people say that it's the reason murder is wrong, or it's wrong to punch a kitten and that the reason for this is god says so I think they're selling humanity a little short.
Trauma, Religion, Phobia - I like to think of them all as sort of a foreign body that invades your mind. Much like a physical foreign body that is embedded in your tissue your body will adapt, first attempting to kill it, then eject it, then when all that doesn't work it will isolate it and do the best it can at remaining functional. If there's something the human body is good at, it's adapting to trauma.
It's pedantic to ask you to verify your blanket claims of stupidity and emotional disturbance?
I suppose you are saying that if Spock were a human he wouldn't be pathological. This might be true but if so it defeats the purpose of Spock--can you imagine a human Spock? no one would like him.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
But if you're living your life base on a pointless construct, you probably like it all the same. Doesn't make you less irrational or crippled for doing so.
And now you're posting in D&D. Shall we consider you among those who are stupid then? Especially considering you had no trouble generalizing a whole group of people, conflating those you disagree with and those who you don't. If you could please keep your opinions regarding each of the sub-forums here out of your arguments then I believe people would have an easier time reading what you write and you might be able to participate in the conversation rather than sniping at people from the sidelines.
Atomic Ross, can you tell me why you believe someone is irrational for placing faith in a religion, a system that is admittedly irrational itself? Before you respond, if you respond, please read what I posted before regarding the difference between irrationality and illogical thought.
I'm also just as smart as you fucks who think that because I have a belief system I'm crazy. I'm a free thinker, I'm a progressive thinker, and while I have spiritual beliefs, I accept all science as explaining the physical laws of the world. I don't reject rationality, and if science or rational thinking interferes with my beliefs, then I will revise my beliefs to adjust for the real, rational, physical world. Part of my belief is to do what I feel is right.
So explain to me, you anti-religion people, why you are so much better than me. I don't think I'm better than you. I think that people of any belief, as long as they don't interfere with rational knowledge or just being any sort of good person, are fine. I support all religions. I support religious people. I don't like stupidity, but some of you seem to think that because I have religious beliefs that makes me one of them.
So explain why. Because it's pretty damn insulting to assume you're smarter than me because you don't have specific beliefs. In fact, it's pretty much exactly the dumb part of religions.
ignoring emotion and irrational or non-rational beliefs or actions is an irrational thing to do, in a bad way.
a truly rational person would be in touch with their emotions and those of others, unless they were sociopathic, which is not something you can really control, rational or not.
You're just calling people names because they don't think like you.
Only if the person asking is being willfully ignorant. You know what contexts we're speaking of, yet you continue to try to make the argument something its not. Probably because it's all that works as rebuttal.
Is that about the size of it?
No one is making claims of superiority, but people like you two are why debate doesn't happen. You get defensive when you can't find footing in an argument, turn the whole thing personal, and shut it down. Please stop. No one is coming after you.
My faith provided me the code of morals I follow.
At the end of the day, you and I both think it is wrong to kill people.
Why the FUCK does it matter how or why we believe that to be the right thing?
Like I said, I know what it's like to be completely irrational, and I *know* I am being irrational when I am being irrational. It's like knowing for a fact that God does not exist, but still believing in Him. And yet it doesn't really impair me in any significant way.