Quote:
Originally Posted by Original Position
I'll clarify my point because this is not an adequate response to my criticism. You said:
You are making two descriptive claim about religious people here, first that they will do what they are told regardless of its morality, and second that they claim blind obedience as a virtue. I'll agree with you that most Christians do regard obedience towards God as a virtue (although they would typically disagree that this obedience should be blind). However, I don't think it is accurate to describe religious people as just blindly doing what they are told and the claim they are is likely rooted in negative and false assumptions about religious people. Just look around - religion has historically been a huge source of social unrest and conflict - do you really think that is the result of them being too biddable?
Claiming that Christians are hypocritical for not always obeying God is completely irrelevant to whether your descriptive claim about religious people is accurate.
I think religious ideas and beliefs really do make a difference in people's lives and society at large, but usually not in a simple rationalist model of human behavior where you can derive behavior directly from stated beliefs. I just don't find it impressive to show that, based on this model of human behavior, religious people are hypocrites. After all, it is easy enough to demonstrate this about nearly everyone.
For example, when I taught Ethics I would often include a class on Peter Singer's essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" because it was effective in generating the same sense of hypocrisy in secular (and religious) students that you are here ascribing just to religious people. Students weren't willing to accept that distance is morally relevant, but also acknowledged its real impact on behavior.
It just seems to me that our brains aren't very good at translating our stated moral and existential beliefs, goals, and desires into action. You can understand this as people not actually having those beliefs or desires. But I'm more persuaded by the view that this kind of rationalism is somewhat counter to our evolutionary programming and so we should expect that beliefs that don't have immediate and localized payoffs to be less effective in causing behavior.
Well I know better, but I kind of get the feeling the A-team is being sent in to debate micro points while the critical self-conflicting, fallacious, and supernatural claims central to the religion are ignored.
Of course I'm not saying only the religious are hypocritical, but to use it as a defense for the preposterous nature of the belief system? As in, "We don't really live according to that crap," as a defense of the religion??
Rapists rampant in the church, Inquisition for centuries, all the borrowed structure of the dogma, fraud galore ... NOTHING convinces the true believer that a loving god just might not be behind this whole thing. Over a thousand years into the love doctrine, it's murder and torture from the high Pontiff. Maybe it's not really coming from god.
A course in comparative religion, a documentary on the history of the Roman power religion, a documentary on the Holy Inquisition, a consideration that some 4000 religions today are operating, and thousands more previously. What are the chances that it is just a mythological belief system? Near 100% from any reasonable analysis.
It's not about negative evaluation of religious people, it's about negative evaluation of the whole epistemology and insidious apologetics that have to be resorted to to support it. The second you peak out of the indoctrination and begin a gnostic path of learning instead of believing, of challenging instead of miming, you're massively moral, imo.