I told him of course there was more of a sliding scale between total piety and a life of crime and he just went wide-eyed and went, "Not to me there isn't!"[
It seemed like just a line from a God-freak at the time but the idea's been gnawing at me ever since then. Was that guy actually incapable of differentiating right from wrong by himself?
What's interesting to me is that this is also essentially the justification for "Being gay is a choice" reasoning. I mean, are you CHOOSING to be straight? Because I sure as hell didn't.
We here consider critical thinking to be an ideal to strive for, but a lot of people don't - they don't want the responsibility of doing it, or the accountability of explaining their thoughts. We value independence, but a lot of people don't - they want to be cared for and told what to do. We value the right to make our own decisions and take responsibility for them, but a lot of people don't. They don't trust themselves to do so, whether they really should or shouldn't.
[...]
Ask a random person what Freedom means and you're likely to get a very strange answer. It's personal to everybody, to be sure, but often you'll hear stuff that doesn't even approach any sort of common definition of the term. It's because everybody here knows that Freedom is something good, but to many, what we call freedom is actually something of a personal nightmare. They didn't ask for this. They didn't choose to take on the responsibilities that come with rights, they were born right into it!
Oh sure. The religious right is propped up by people who want to be told what to think, what to believe, what to fear. (Not JUST the religious right, obviously; you'll find plenty of dogmatic parrots on all sides of any issue.)
There was a reddit interview recently with
Fred Phelps's son who left Crazytown as soon as he turned 18. Here's a bit that jumped out at me (or at the guy who quoted it on Boing Boing, I forget):
Yes, there is a tremendous amount of selective quoting. But this is lost on them because they never really were taught to examine the Bible and decide for themselves. They were taught to believe what he believes. This leaves them wholly unable to truly debate anyone. They recognize certain sounds and respond to those sounds with the sounds they learned. They don't critically analyze the incoming sounds at all.
One of those sounds they recognize is "why do you preach if you don't think people can be saved" to which they respond with the sound "it's not our job to save, only to preach". It's what I call the divine Nuremberg defense.
That's pretty much it -- Westboro is an extreme example, obviously, but fundamentalists of any type are essentially trained as dumb database-retrieval machines. Give them a key and they'll spit out a value, but that's as much processing as they're willing to do.
And often they are wonderful people. I've spoken of my grandmother now and again; she's the sweetest lady you'll ever meet but my God does she have some strange ideas. (And by "have" I mean "possess", not "produce".) The other day at dinner when a commercial got loud I said something as innocuous as "Congress is making them lower the volume of commercials. At least they agree on SOMETHING." And the next thing I knew she was talking about aborting babies based on their sex, and when I said I don't think that has ever actually happened in the United States she started in on how states are passing Sharia Law now. (She pronounced the "i" like "eye".) I started to explain that in this conversation the position consistent with Sharia Law would actually be the one that increases restrictions on abortions, but I managed to steer it back to "Hey, this is some good spaghetti right here."
Sometimes you have to take a step back for a second and think about what it really must be like to be a True Neutral farmer from Iowa with an IQ of 100.
Funny you mention farms in Iowa. Because she was born on one.
But, that guy deserves his own Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness too, even if he doesn't necessarily want all of it. Do we foist him into this glorious new age of critical thinking, personal ethics, self-reliance and responsibility or do we let him stay comfortably wrapped up in whatever social dressing keeps him happy and productive?
I'm pretty happy with the "Let him believe whatever he wants as long as he doesn't try to force it on everybody else" school.
Unfortunately, evangelicals really aren't big on the whole live-and-let-live thing.
Sometimes you wanna kick these peoples' asses, and it's usually when they start coming over to you and telling you that you should live in their own derpy THIS GUY IS RIGHT way, but the goal here is really to make sure they're all happy in their own way without being ABLE to come over here try to make us live in their own derpy way. And then kick the asses of the backstabbing dirtbags who keep pulling their strings, because we're the good guys, damn it.
So yeah.
There's an extent to which I'll buy that. But I'm still pretty big on the "Try and teach them critical thinking in schools" idea because it's the best inoculation AGAINST being a puppet.
Plus, people who go around talking about personal responsibility should really be able to take personal responsibility for the shit they're saying.
And back to something you said earlier about us not generally hanging out with people that diametrically different to us: this is probably the single biggest reason I am, and remain, a supporter of public education despite its flaws.
My other grandmother, a public educator herself, once said something to me: "We could have sent you to private school if we'd wanted to. You'd have probably learned more. But I just couldn't stomach the idea of sending you to the same school
Symington's kids were going to."
I believe there's something inherently positive about places that force you to interact with people who are from different backgrounds and have different beliefs. Public school is probably the biggest and best example I can think of. Public university is another good one -- I'm sure I've mentioned my former roommate, a guy who chose college instead of a Mormon mission and slowly moved away from the church and its way of thinking as we helped him expand his horizons. (BTW he'd been homeschooled after his folks pulled him from public school out of concern that he was being taught too much multiculturalism.)
And of course once we're done with school there's work, where you're pretty likely to have SOME people you generally get along with but don't agree with. Unless you're working for the ACLU or some other self-selecting organization, I guess. (And even there I'd be the guy disagreeing with the bosses' "money = speech" policy.)
The problem is so many people are indoctrinated at such an early age by people they are hardwired to trust (their parents) that even if they have above average IQs or are otherwise capable of thinking critically they still end up believing in a 6000 year old earth.
And -- not speaking to your friend specifically, of course, but in general -- the most insidious form of indoctrination is punishing people for asking questions. The thing I linked actually pushed corporal punishment in schools, a pretty serious fucking Neanderthal idea (from people who don't believe in Neanderthals).
There are precious few cases where I think it's acceptable to punish someone for asking questions, and all of them involve some sort of immediate danger that precludes having a discussion RIGHT NOW. (Or preparation for same, I suppose, as in military drills, but that gets us off on a rather different tack and a whole other ethical/pragmatic debate.)
There's that bit in Religulous where Maher asks somebody "If you'd been taught fairy tales were fact and the Bible was a fairy tale, would you know the difference?" Obviously that's a hypothetical (and just going to piss somebody off if you ask him that), but it's a pretty good comparison.
I had a friend once, raised by atheist British parents, who told me that they never explained the religious background of Christmas to her, that it was just a tree and presents. (I don't think they even gave much more than lip service to Santa Claus; she said she didn't remember ever believing he was real.) She said that, in kindergarten, when a friend explained the Story of Christmas to her, she responded by laughing and telling her "I can't believe you believe that." This, as you might expect, cost her a friend.
Funnily enough, last I heard out of her she was pretty big into the whole church thing. She doesn't actually believe any of that stuff literally (and indeed it takes very little effort to get her to start talking about all the pernicious ignorance in the Bible and the same as practiced by the religious right) but it appeals to her because of a sense of ritual and community.
Which brings us to another point: church and religion have a real appeal, a real sense of comfort and belonging. That's why people are more inclined to believe what they're taught there (or by their parents, or by a good teacher, or what-have-you). Stepping outside that comfort zone is, well, uncomfortable.
That's a very long post.
Well, I'll leave you with this, from Douglas Adams:
I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.