Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled.
Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.
“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.
I would argue the former is the more worrying of the two. We all know not to trust the schizophrenic.
But religious people aren’t just saying “God Bless You” when we sneeze. They are telling us how to vote, whether to wear masks, vaccinate our children, shun our neighbors, annihilate nations, and they are doing this on the basis of entirely unsupported, yet strongly held personal belief.
Any suggestion that there isn’t a problem is demonstrably false, and your claim that I am creating the problem is gaslighting. I’m not going to waste a bunch of time pointing at a bunch of lesser religiously-supported evils to prove it. I’m just going to take them as read, and skip to the end: religious zealots fly planes into buildings.
Ah, so your problems with religion are actually problems with specific religious practices. Its almost like you should just hate those practices instead of directing your anger at a very broad concept.
Your justification for distrusting all religious people is a small minority of Christians and Muslims. Grow up and treat people like people
Where did you get that idea? I don’t believe that is a valid conclusion raising from my arguments.
My “anger at a very broad concept” should have been a clue that those specific harmful practices I mentioned were exemplar, and not an exhaustive list. Further examples could be drawn from every organized religion, as well as from any and all individual “spiritual” beliefs.
No, my distrust of religious people is not based solely on those few examples of harm that I have presented, but on the underlying philosophical model, which could be characterized as a preference for hypothesization over experimentation. This is a “content of character” question, not a condemnation of specific religions.
This is an oversimplification of religion. There is a difference between someone’s religious beliefs, and how they approach logic in a real world situation. A religious person does not just always make a hypothesis and assume it to be true no matter what. They are capable of being normal functioning human beings and differentiating from fact and fiction outside of their religion. If they aren’t capable of this, then I agree its a problem. But its not a problem with religion, its a problem with the person.
So your problem is that people are believing things you disagree with because it gives them a sense of fulfillment and community without harming anyone else. It could not possibly be more clear that you are the problem.
And no, it is not gaslighting to point out why you are wrong about something. That’s a ridiculous tactic to avoid the tiniest bit of self reflection.
None of that arises from any part of my argument. Your stated conclusions are a product of your own mind and have nothing to do with anything I have said. Your argument is, thus, a strawman fallacy.
It is the fundamental basis of religion. The common denominator. The sine qua non: the component without which the philosophical model in question could not be reasonably described as religious.
Conceded.
The capability of distinguishing fact from fiction is meaningless in the circumstances where the individual deliberately intends to reject fact. In declaring themselves religious, they indicate that there are certain circumstances where they intend to do just that.
From what I can gather, it effectively is your argument. You dislike that people believe things that are not supported with evidence. I do not personally think it matters because they gain value from it and do not harm others in the process. What am I missing?
I can’t disagree with that, but I just don’t see why it matters so much. If they seriously gain that much value from believing something, then let them.