quote: Dagonee- why don't you just admit that psychology is too technical a field for you to ever truly grasp without earning an advanced degree? The whole reason that we have experts on any given subject is so that they can tell us what to think about a given subject which we cannot possibly comprehend.
Perhaps you should just take Squicky's word for it that the religious are on average more immature and hence more dangerous.
When the religious finally come to understand their delusion for what it is our society will finally be able to make some progress towards a true utopian society in which the wise and learned among us guide the ignorant to the fountain of light.
Honestly, I should have expected that people on a science fiction forum would understand this. Haven't any of you read the Lathe of Heaven? Ursula LeGuin understood what a perfect world could be provided if we trusted those who have the real truth.
So you do get it, Jacare.
I'm not going to say that there aren't people out with an immature anti-religion prejudice that would take what I posted as justification for something like that. There certainly are such people and they would twist what I said so that it was the opposite of what I actually said and, more ironically, exhibit the same tendencies for prejudice and authoritarianism that I was specifically decrying.
I've been trying to go out of my way to say that these people are out there. The highs, lows, and middles of maturity are found in religious and non-religious people. However, the data from studies in America shows that there are proportionally more prejudiced people in religion. Saying "Well, non-religious people do it too." as a reason for why it's not a problem with religion is no more valid than someone claiming that religious equals prejudiced.
I had a couple new thoughts while I was writing this. It would interesting to see if taking the levels of dedication to other organizations in the non-religious people would result in the same curivlinear relationship to prejudice. That would be an interesting study. I don't know if anyone has done it yet.
Second - this is sort of based on the intrinsic religious orientation and the quote by Gordon Zahn (which I thought was pretty cool. I expected at least someone to say something about it.) - I wonder if there is a greater underlying factor here. Something like a dedication to truth, especially over loyalty.
I was particularly impressed by Zahn's statement:
quote:And he will expose them in the confident faith that, however much of an embarrassment his revelations might at first present, they will in the long run contribute to the welfare of the Church, which proclaims that Truth is One, and which therefore insists that any apparent divergence between fact and faith must be tested and explored and ultimately reconciled in that unity of truth.
especially in regards to the contrary attitude that a lie that is good for the church is better than a truth that hurts it. As such, I wonder if we could some how measure a person's dedication to truth over other concerns, if that would correlately negatively with prejudice and immaturity in general. I'm willing to be that it would.
That's a little vague maybe. A large part would be bound up in believing that the best way to get someone on your side is to help them mature and be able to see the truth rather than prosteletyze them or trick them into your viewpoint. If you really beleive that what you believe is true, then anyone well able to recognize truth and, for example, distinguish prejudice from good thinking, is going to believe it without you trying to get them to. I took Zahn's point to be that, if the Church is true, you're only hurting it by hiding the truth about things that are originally going to hurt it. Instead, these should be seen as indications of where the Church has fallen from the truth and made to make it better.
quote:MrSquicky said: Saying "Well, non-religious people do it too." as a reason for why it's not a problem with religion is no more valid than someone claiming that religious equals prejudiced.
No one has said this. You were the one who compared the "immature" phsychology of religious and non-religious groups.
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I find it interesting that the posters can't agree on a definition of prejudice. Squicky has said that it's not how one feels about something but how they act on those feelings. But the Christian God holds us to a higher standard. "You have heard it said 'Do not commit adultery.' But I say to you, any man who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart." -Matthew 27,28 So if God tells us our thoughts need to be pure, but psychology tells us only our actions need to be pure, how can psychology define prejudice in any way Christians can agree with? Unfortunetly, the religious and non-religious are approaching the world from radically differnt points of view.
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Dagon, Jacare did. He posted a sarcastic characterization of what a prejudiced anti-religious person would say. As I said, that's more towards my point than against it.
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quote:MrSquicky said: Dagon, Jacare did. He posted a sarcastic characterization of what a prejudiced anti-religious person would say. As I said, that's more towards my point than against it. "
No, he didn’t. He might have made a pointed statement about intellectuals based on your attitude in this thread, but nowhere did he use his attack on intellectuals to say that “it's (the “immature” thinking described in your first post) not a problem with religion.”
I think his point was that your immediate dismissal of pretty much everyone’s arguments about and against your main point has more than a little parallel to a fundamentalist’s dismissal of the attitudes of “heathens” because they “just aren’t saved.” Not to excuse one with the other, but to point out that you seem to have a need for definiteness, demand acknowledgment of the authority of psychologists, view types of religion in a dichotomy (immature/mature), blame others’ disagreement with your post on the others’ lack of knowledge you haven’t shared, and shown an extreme institutional loyalty to the accepted paradigms of psychology.
It’s called irony.
Dagonee P.S., And you’ve still never addressed anyone’s disagreements with the second point (your assumption that immature attitudes are more dangerous in the religious than the non-religious) from the first post in this thread.
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