Tolerance of other beliefs.
Caboose
title = name(self, handle) Join Date: 2003-02-15 Member: 13597Members, Constellation
title = name(self, handle) Join Date: 2003-02-15 Member: 13597Members, Constellation
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">Why?</div><!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><!--coloro:#FF0000--><span style="color:#FF0000"><!--/coloro-->First Addendum:
After too many bad experiences with them, we prohibit 'science vs. religion' debates. This extends to evolutionarism - creationism topics. The past threads dealing with such subjects left a lot of bad blood and showed that both sides are just hit too deeply in their believes to hold a truly productive discussion. From now on, we'd like to ask you to keep your topics on one side of the divide (for example a purely mundane discussion of homosexuality or a religious discussion of the same subject, but not both intermingled), and keep your arguments within such a thread either rational-scientifical or theological.<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I quote this passage before my post as a reminder, keep it in mind before replying. I also quote it as a reminder to the mods that, while this topic may question of the <i>reasoning</i> behind the need for such a clause in the discussion forum rules, it is by no intention of mine, to break it.
I expect all arguments to be logical, and based in reality.
With that out of the way...
This is a topic about morality, specifically, why do atheists, agnostics, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Krishna's, Wiccans, or religious people of any faith, have to bend over backwards to "tolerate" other's religious beliefs, when each one of knows their belief is the only true belief?
After too many bad experiences with them, we prohibit 'science vs. religion' debates. This extends to evolutionarism - creationism topics. The past threads dealing with such subjects left a lot of bad blood and showed that both sides are just hit too deeply in their believes to hold a truly productive discussion. From now on, we'd like to ask you to keep your topics on one side of the divide (for example a purely mundane discussion of homosexuality or a religious discussion of the same subject, but not both intermingled), and keep your arguments within such a thread either rational-scientifical or theological.<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I quote this passage before my post as a reminder, keep it in mind before replying. I also quote it as a reminder to the mods that, while this topic may question of the <i>reasoning</i> behind the need for such a clause in the discussion forum rules, it is by no intention of mine, to break it.
I expect all arguments to be logical, and based in reality.
With that out of the way...
This is a topic about morality, specifically, why do atheists, agnostics, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Krishna's, Wiccans, or religious people of any faith, have to bend over backwards to "tolerate" other's religious beliefs, when each one of knows their belief is the only true belief?
Comments
So, what does this "bending over backwards" refer to? A modicum of tolerance is required of us all so we can live together peacefully, but beyond that, we're all free to do and don't as we please. I don't have to light candles during Hanukkah. I don't have to fast during Ramadan. Nobody forces me to go to church during easter (yes, christians, <i>easter</i> is your greatest holiday, not christmas, and the fact that so many of you are ignorant about this speaks volumes about you). I don't have to observe the eight Sabbats. I can eat both all the pork and all the beef I want, I don't care whether it's kosher or jhatka (actually, I'd prefer if it weren't kosher - bleeding the animal to death seems unnecessarily cruel), and nobody cares that I don't care. So where exactly do I bend over backwards?
Except they're too polite to tell the rest. And there is virtually no way to justify a person's religion being more "correct" than the other person's since it is all based on faith.
Other religions do not condemn non-participants: A buddhist or hindu may believe that you are reincarnated no matter whether you practice either of those religions.
So where <i>does</i> "bending over backwards" come into play? Caboose, can we have a clarification?
* The forum software insists on mangling the URL if I enclose it in tags, so here: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar..." target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar...</a>.
I even had to slap an extra period on the end to stop it from doing it again. STOP BEING SUCH A SMACKTARD, FORUM!
My original post, was difficult to put into words because of the discussion forum rules, and I suppose I have failed to convey my point with it.
So, I suppose what I was trying to say, is that each group knows they are right, why can't they prove it? Why do people hold onto their beliefs, even when confronted with hundreds of other belief systems, or with good old fashioned logic for that matter?
Sometimes, one religion succeeds in converting a few people from another, or, some people give into reason and drop religion altogether. But for the vast majority of people, they hold onto their beliefs and never change.
So, rather than tolerance (poor choice of wording on my part), why is it, that if so many people know that they are right, do so many differing systems exist? And why doesn't one of them manage to convince all the others of it's obvious superiority? (Not taking a side, although I have already stated my position)
Why is there so much diversity?
My original post, was difficult to put into words because of the discussion forum rules, and I suppose I have failed to convey my point with it.
So, I suppose what I was trying to say, is that each group knows they are right, why can't they prove it? Why do people hold onto their beliefs, even when confronted with hundreds of other belief systems, or with good old fashioned logic for that matter?
Sometimes, one religion succeeds in converting a few people from another, or, some people give into reason and drop religion altogether. But for the vast majority of people, they hold onto their beliefs and never change.
So, rather than tolerance (poor choice of wording on my part), why is it, that if so many people know that they are right, do so many differing systems exist? And why doesn't one of them manage to convince all the others of it's obvious superiority? (Not taking a side, although I have already stated my position)
Why is there so much diversity?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This new question has nothing at all to do with tolerance. You're asking why there are so many religions. Not that that's a bad question or anything.
There are lots of answers to that question, but I think the easiest answer is that religion is based on faith, not reason. The groundwork for a religion is what you feel, and what you feel doesn't have to accord with any specific evidence in the real world, or if it does, people cherry pick the evidence and distort it to match what they want to feel. Because religion can have a nonrational basis instead of a rational basis, you can have conflicting religious beliefs with no way to resolve the conflict. If a Christian says they feel the presence of Jesus and a Muslim says they feel the presence of Mohammad, there is no way to go beyond this and go from two religions to one religion. Those two people are basing their beliefs on their feelings, and since there is no rational basis to disprove a feeling, they can go on believing in their mutually incompatible religions forever.
You might say "but why does one person feel Jesus and the other feel Mohammad?" to which you could give any number of answers, the easiest being "the Jesus person grew up around Christians and Mr. Mohammad grew up around Muslims." There are other explanations, but they are all specific to one person or another: in general, what's important isn't <i>how</i> people choose their individual religions but just that the basis of a religion is something that you cannot prove or disprove and therefore it can vary among people.
We are so full of all kinds of irrational beliefs, what's to keep us from carrying a few additional ones?
Consider this: 90% or so of swedish men believe they are better than average at driving.
We have all these biases, like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error" target="_blank">the fundamental attribution error</a> (thinking your better/more moral/nicer person than other people you observe, e.g. swedish drivers) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias" target="_blank">Confirmation bias</a> (which keeps us from changing our minds on beliefs that we hold, like religion).
Even our own eyesight is so enchanced by memory and modeling, that we believe we see more of what's around us than we actually do!
We're irrational, and we will always be irrational except for the slight mending education can do. I, an agnostic, just accept this, knowing that I myself am blind and irrational when it comes to a lot of questions. And even though I very much care for the standards of science and education in society, I just relax and enjoy the diversity of beliefs when it comes to my social life.
Ouch, better read up on your Islam. Mohammed is no deity like Jesus, he was just a prophet. The muslim creed goes something like:"Allah is one, and Mohammed is his prophet." (Stressing that nothing is on the level of God, unlike the christian trinity or the polytheistic gods)
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Take the romans, for instance: All they demanded of those living in their territories (read: conquered lands) was that they paid some respect to the roman emperor in terms of a bit of sacrifice and worship.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
According to something mentioned in Taleb's The Black Swan, the romans demanded to have a statue of one of their gods (Jupiter?) in the jewish temple, which they thought would be okay if they set up a statue of God from the bible in one of the temples of Rome. Of course, this created an uproar as making an image of God just made everything worse. If I recall correctly, this might have had something to do with the first jewish uprising.
I know, but that wasn't the point of my explanation. I just wanted to use two of the most popular religions and pair them each up with their spokesman. It wasn't theologically sound, but then again, no religion is theologically sound when you look at it from most peoples' perspective (that is, from the perspective of another religion).
It is like convincing somebody who likes blue that red is a better colour. Because... it's just personal.
We are so full of all kinds of irrational beliefs, what's to keep us from carrying a few additional ones?
Consider this: 90% or so of swedish men believe they are better than average at driving.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well, they could all be right, if the other 10% are just really, really bad drivers...
Also being tolerant when faced with other beliefs is kinda hard, cause most vegetarians would rather say: "It is wrong to eat meat!" instead of "Personally I prefer not to eat meat, because [insert reason that makes sense to you]"
Same goes for creationism vs evolution, cause it is just soo damn easy to say that an allmighty power controls everything and made everything just as it is now and you cannot disproof that, cause your will to disprove it is an expression of the same allmighty power.
Creationism aint a bad theory. It just gets messy, when people start combining it with their own code of morals.
And same goes for pretty much anything. Lets take start trek vs star wars for example. The empire in SW was envisioned to be huge and vase, with an industry output that can built a moon-sized battle station in 2 years. The federation was envisioned to be an in comparison small band of scientists and explorers.
Yet most star trek fans will say that the federation could easily beat the empire and the standard arguments are always: Good guys win or some technobabble that always leads to: Miracle victroies for the federation, despite the overwhelming odds.
This isn't really an answer to his revised question, but to address your point, I think the reason the debate is forbidden is not because it's important but because nobody is going to read someone's post on the NS forums and go "ah, that changes my mind completely!" I don't think Darwin really championed the science vs religion debate either. He was an agnostic and I don't think he ever even engaged in those kinds of debates.
And on that note, in the forbidden debate, if sound evidence were presented to me, disproving my views on religion, or on evolution, I would gladly abandon my beliefs. What I don't understand, as mentioned above, is the concept of faith. (At least past psychological explanations)
Aside from being brought up a certain way, and being told certain things from authority figures as children, where is the foundation for faith?
Faith is basically its own foundation. That is, in fact, the point. Asking about the source of faith is like asking the source of compassion or anger: you could point to a million instances of actions that led someone to feel specific compassion or specific anger, but the question of "where do these feelings come from in the first place" is just "that's how humans work" or more specifically you can dig into neuroscience and psychology to get more concrete answers. In any case, it boils down to "our bodies work that way," one of the components of this being faith. People feel like they have a faith in their religion just because they feel that way, and to a lot of people, their feelings are so important that they override other evidence or serve as appropriate evidence for determining their actions.
This is where a lot of creationists like to confuse the debate. Evolution is a theory because it is disprovable. The reason it is generally accepted is because there is a lot of evidence that supports it.
Creationism is not disprovable because any time evidence to the contrary appears, it is willed away with other unsupported and un-testable beliefs, such as the devil planted the evidence.
<!--quoteo(post=1704295:date=Apr 6 2009, 10:01 AM:name=puzl)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(puzl @ Apr 6 2009, 10:01 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1704295"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->The special casing of science vs religion is actually a kowtowing to the general special casing of religion throughout society and should be fought at every step by rational people. It is one of the very worst things about the NS community that we can't take part in what is probably one of the most important discussion since the enlightenment. The irony was never lost on me that the community of a game that pays homage to Charles Darwin forbids the type of debate that Darwin championed.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
IMO the real irony is that there is no debate, merely creationists plugging their ears and screaming at the top of their lungs to any and all who will listen.
Nowadays, the idea that the sun is mounted on a chariot pulled by horses is absurd, but back then, that was pretty much the best guess they had.
Well, I've never been much of a "that's just how things work" kind of person. I recently read a paper, "Morality: An Evolutionary Account, from a journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science. The short version of that article is that certain behaviors increase the likelihood that genes possessed by an individual will survive, through a variety of processes like group selection, sexual selection, kin selection and other processes. It's a rather long article though, and I don't feel like summarizing it, but if you have database access through university, I recommend looking it up, it's a good read.
Good, it shows your curious. But you shouldn't expect too much from a game forum, if you want to dwelve deeper than popscience.
As for evolutionary psychology, it's very interesting, but one ought to be careful as popular EP can be quite speculative, making big assumptions on what psychological traits were useful in the stone age.