To be fair, religious people are just as guilty of this kind of thing.
i didn't say otherwise, and it's equally repulsive among religious people. see my comment: "i'm an atheist, and i'm not against Christianity at all (only hateful Christians, as well as hateful Jews, hateful Muslims and hateful people in general)." not the same thing, but the same basic idea.
You summed it up pretty well. It's the confidence, or lack thereof, within those beliefs. Those who have doubts about their convictions, or those who have never really questioned their faith (religious or not) generally see any questioning or opposition of said faith as a personal attack, and tend to try to shore up their own beliefs by belittling the belief of others.
you can lead a horse to water...
i avoid making statements that direct. it can cause people to become defensive, and that's unproductive to learning. of course, that might not matter to you, but i'm interested in becomming a teacher. i try to use weaker suggestions so that my audience arrives are similar conclusions as do i, but since they're independently re-tracing the steps of thought, the logical conclusion doesn't feel like an outside attack.
but moving on, i think it runs more deeply than confidence in one's own beliefs; i think it boils down to confidence in one's own self. you know, this discussion reminds me more and more of a class i took.
my minor was as much a minor in a particular professor. he was fun, unassuming, had a good sense of humor, treated all his students with respect, and he took a genuine interest in me; we're still friends. at any rate, he taught a class that he said he thought of "only so I'd have a reason to assign (Allen Ginsberg's) Howl." the class was called Wisdom: Literatures of Authority.
it was technically a world lit class. he intended the class of about 15 students to explore the question, What is wisdom? During the first half of the class, we read all sorts of random texts. from Howl to the Meno, from bumper stickers that said "Visualize World Peace" and "Visualize Whirrled Peas" to
A Cyborg's Manifesto. and we were provided with absolutely no context for any of these texts, something unheard of in modern academic settings. halfway through the course, he said his intention up to that point was to confuse and frustrate us (a very Zen style of teaching).
some of the students in the class were trying to tie together these desperate ideas, looking for some unified wisdom beneath the supposed the centuries of cultural accretion. however, the class wasn't focused on answering the question, What is wise? most of the students seemed to think that wisdom and wise action/thought/belief were the same thing. i knew Prof. Cohen had other ideas in mind because i was familiar with one of the two theorists we'd be learning midway through the syllabus - Michel Foucault if you're up on social theory, but i don't need to talk about him really.
Foucault thoerized power, and his ideas inspired a guy named Bruce Lincoln to look at the concept of authority in a new light.
Lincoln argued that authority (like power, in Foulcaults ideas) occurs between people, specifically between people he dubbed speakers and people he dubbed audience. a stage and podium isn't required... all the time, but there is a theatrical or presentational element to authority (the Emperor's New Clothes, "the clothes make the man, police gavels, judge's robes, the position the lecturer takes at the front of the hall). anyway, for him, authority represents an occurance in which the audience silences itself to hear itself speak through the speaker. this might seem convoluted at first, but think about a few things first. in such an environment, the audience has gossip (not silencing itself) as a way to undermine the speaker's authority. think also about the common idiom, "i couldn't have said it better myself." imagine a scenario where a family misses its usual sermon in the morning and attend the afternoon one with a different preacher; upon getting home, the wife could easily be imagined saying something like, "i've never found anyone who could put my beliefs into words so well." ultimately, authority comes from the audience, both their perception of the marks of authority (look at all the regalia of the Catholic mafia, er, church) and their perception of the message (i can definately say that i majored in sociology because i finally found people who could say the things i felt intelligently).
the final paper prompt for Wisdom was something to the effect: select a text you consider to be wise, develop a theory of wisdom, and then apply it to your chosen text.
i picked the Communist Manifesto, and i went essentially with the theory he presented, that wisdom works essentially like authority. i looked at two things that'd happened to me: the first, a drunken argument with a marine i didn't know about the meaning of patriotism in a democracy that nearly ended with me being beaten into drengin kibble; and some protracted musings about beauty as a renewable resource in a consumer captialism and about how that related to the marxian concept of alienation i engaged in with a good friend while sitting on my roof high on psilocybin mushrooms (c'mon, you had to know that was there somewhere).
so my analysis of wisdom and the Communist Manifesto led me to extend the ideas about authority. i observed that the audience (me) can retain a memory of the speaker and speech and use that to more or less rationalize otherwise egregious action (in my case, arguing with a stranger who i only knew as a friend of a roommate, and talking derisively about new neighbors).
don't get me wrong, it also justifies actions that'd otherwise be unthinkably heroic like dying for your country (or on the cross). you might be surprised about what interested me in this conclusion. i don't really care that speeches and texts, religious or otherwise, can provide justification to people for distasteful and even inhuman acts. what concerned me most was that it seems so many people are incapable of justifying their own actions without relying on some kind of external authority, that so much of the time it seems like we childishly need some kind of permission to act.
incidentally, that day i shroomed was also the day i became as atheist as i think i can get (out of my sense of intellectual integrity, i think no god is the most likely scenario, however out of that same sense i have to admit that the truth is ultimately unknowable, which ultimately makes me agnostic).
we decided to eat the mushrooms while there would still be daylight, and after they'd hit i laid looking into the clear blue sky and a fiberous pattern emerged. i wasn't so high as to believe it was really there, nor have i ever been; i knew at the time it was an hallucination. but i also figure there's a good chance hallucinations can be projections of some sort arising from one's own mind.
hey, we're talking religion here, which presumable has something to do with spirituality, and psychedelics are a common aspect of spiritual and religious praxis outside the Abrahamic religions, and even in some cases within them Islamic Sufism and classical Jewish Hassidism as but two examples.
so anyway, back to the drug trip. the fiberous pattern in the sky coalesced into a giant eye looking directly down on me, and i thought to myself, "i really want someone to be up there, or somewhere, watching me and remembering me. i don't want to feel that alone."
and no, i'm not high now. it's just that i've mostly been responding to others in this discussion, but i haven't talked in too much depth about my own spiritual life. atheists have
dark nights of the soul, too. it's kind of like the lyrics to Portishead's Wandering Star:
Please could you stay awhile to share my grief
For its such a lovely day
To have to always feel this way
And the time that I will suffer less
Is when I never have to wake
Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved
The blackness of darkness forever
Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved
The blackness of darkness forever
rather than sinking into hopeless depression, my revelation led me to cherish what's here. humans are stubborn and childish, but there are times when we're so teeming with life, creativity, passion and vision that i'm overwhelmed. i think that's about as close as satori or being filled with the holy spirit as i'll ever come, and it's the foundation of my belief system. i think the point of sharing all this was to kind of show that people who don't believe in god can still have deep spritual lives and cultivate the same virtues they can through belief. perahps you might think of understanding it like this: i can only see god in his creation. personally, i kind of view people who believe in god but who i also admire as so overwhelmed by the wonder of life that they can't take credit for it (as a species, that is).
i mean, the point of this discussion was trying to figure out why people of different beliefs are so prone to fighting; maybe it's partly because we assume we're so different from one another.
..anyway, i guess to conclude i've got one more quote ("Marvel at my encyclopedic knowlegdge of Star Trek!" - that was for you, Vinraith).
and sorry again for another long post. i figured for some of you, it'd be interesting food for thought, and for the rest (of the Americans at least), another reason to complain about the uses to which your taxes are being put.
A passage from Bertrand Russell’s autobiography:
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what –at last– I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
