Sure, absolutely. I think that there are certainly a large segment of authoritarian Christians, but not just… and there is also a long history in the US of the Social Gospel type Christians, too. Authoritarian thinking is the problem, not necessarily religion.
We know that authoritarians LOVE to do that (lump an entire group together), so we should tread with caution on that…
But I also don’t feel like throwing the entire group into the same category, because of a minority is helpful either.
We can call out the fascists and not assume that all religious folks are of that persuasion. That does far more harm to our cause. It separates us from people who are interested in social justice as much as those of us on the atheist/agnostic side of things. And it assumes that everyone who identifies as an atheist/agnostic is on the side of social justice, when there very much are pockets of bigotry in that community.
I’ll keep saying this until I’m blue in the or dead (and I know you don’t need me telling you this, because I know you know it), but context matters, specific circumstances matter.
Right? At what point do we just call it “culture.” This is what humans do. This, domestication, written language, math… these are definitely part of how we function as a species. These are in some way enforced on us in youth via dedication to the mutual good of having an educated population.
That is technically some kind of indoctrination based on some kind of authority but I would argue that it is not harmful, personally.
It’s the same old Know-Nothing 27% present in any given country. Many members of that group in the U.S. also identify as fundamentalist Christians, and the problem is that they’ve been accorded power disproportionate to their actual numbers by the GOP going back to Reagan. So the perception has been deliberately and cynically manufactured. The “majority” in “Moral Majority” was always a lie about American Christians in general. It’s useful to point that out when given the opportunity.
So true. It’s become depressingly common over the past two decades to see some high-profile atheists use their anti-religious position as a springboard for bigotry against Muslims that goes well beyond their adherence to Islam. That’s how we found certain supposedly progressive atheists supporting a born-again Xtian neoConservative President in the early 2000s.
Agreed. We create these cultural structures to strengthen our shared ties and help us get through this sometimes difficult life. I fully believe, more than anything else, that that is our superpower as human. Our ability to abstract and make others understand our POV via culture.
Strikes me that people often use the term propaganda in a similar way - they almost always mean “it’s what the bad guys do that involves making shit up” when it’s just a term employed to describe the shared creation of a cultural environment… Some propaganda or indoctrination is based on truth/facts.
Let’s not forget their misogyny, demanding that women in the west should STFU, as at least we’re not in a Muslim majority country where REAL oppression exists…
Putting aside the fact that the study doesn’t suggest there is a real link between religiosity and criminality anyway beyond the baitline, it’s not probably not ideal to jump to this conclusion either.
There is a strong religious community built around criminality and that religious community manifests strongly in the criminal justice system, recovery, people trying to fit back into society, foster care, etc.
So much so that even if you observe very real evidence of religious fundamentalism and criminality in some people, that correlation could easily be completely unrelated to any particular amount brain damage in either group.
That’s a lot of responsibility, when some journalists are more than happy to completely alter the conclusions of a piece of research, and fail to correct the record when they’re informed of their errors.
Even in the absence of malice, mistakes can and do happen when most journalists who write about health or Science are not actually trained in scientific fields themselves. Science communication is a separate skill from scientific research, and we need the media to commit to it as much if not more so than the scientists themselves.
In addition, social media layers another level of miscommunication on top of the existing problem, with a whole new level of confidently incorrect misinterpretation of the original work, angry reactions to things the original scientists didn’t even say, and the usual “I’m right about everything” attitude that some internet denizens bring to the table.
Not only that we live in a world where AI that write things like “26% percent of users on Reddit found it helpful to ‘kill yourself’ on this topic!” trawl the internet to vomit the psychological equivalent of post-festival sludge on us all. Apparently including the academic science publishing community if some are to be believed?
Reminds me of how before all the other stuff not to like about him, the first thing that really put me off Richard Dawkins was his insistence that literally all fiction is tainted by magical thought and is therefore dangerous to children. This is not a good way to think. But I couldn’t articulate it then… it just made me a little uncomfortable.
Now I see it as a terrible and glaring lack of creativity and a red flag that suggests some disturbing views about children.
If you are on a crusade of binary thought to stamp out all threat of opposing ideologies before they can take root in the minds of others either spontaneously or via contamination then that is a very fundamentalist way of thinking about it at the very least.
Interesting paper. I sure wish they had better data, though. Abolutely nothing about demographics, economics, education of the ~190 study participants with brain damage. Also, fairly big weakness: nothing about when the brain damage might have happened, and which came first: lesions or fundamentalism?
Despite this, very interesting paper with fairly compelling “first look” data. Now we just need to start prospective, public health cohorts in and around communities with fundamentalist churches. I’m sure that’ll go over completely well!
True. But this type of study is a first step towards studying what I think we can all understand as a pretty hard question to study. Can’t easily do a prospective, cohort study on people “at risk” for becoming fundamentalist (to determine which comes first, lesions or extreme religion), and folks in communities like this will probably also be less interested in joining such a study even if funded.
I will believe they are not evil when they stop killing people I care about. I will believe they are not evil when I am truly free to live without fear of them.
I suspect others feel the same about their oppressors.
Rational fear of those who actively hurt us is not bigotry.
When people without their beliefs have all the power and the Christians have none in this society then I can show them what actual mercy looks like if they want to try me… but not until then. If any part of you wouldn’t trust that “mercy” then surely you can understand why I will never trust Christian “mercy.” Certainly not at this juncture of time and space where it is a religion of constant terroristic threat backed with real blood.
I will consider forgiving Christianity for what it is doing to people around me when those empowered by it stop doing that and ask for forgiveness. It is impossible to forgive before that point for anyone wronged imo and I believe that with religious conviction myself.
That’s actually quite an interesting idea. We know that brains are somewhat plastic, able to rewire themselves to suit changing circumstances. We also know that London cab drivers have enlarged hippocampi because of the amount of memorisation done to learn what’s called “The Knowledge.” Thus we could speculate that thinking fundamentalist might make your brain more fundamentalist. I think it would be very hard to research, though.
IIRC from my education, according to some theories, young people pass through various developmental stages, with dualism being one of the early ones. It’s characterized by a kind of absolutism. “My teacher was wrong about Y, therefore, she is a bad teacher.” Not sure if dualism is related to authoritarian thinking. Some people never outgrow it.
No, I think that’s just part of normal development of the human brain. We go from concrete thinking to abstract thinking… I think some people embrace concrete thinking in a sort of dualist fashion, not because they are stuck at some developmental point, but because (as the video I linked above argues) that it is easier in a highly complex capitalist society with a lot of contradictory choices.
The first time I visited an online friend in the 70s, I noticed an obvious JW book on a desk and picked it up. “So they’ve been dropping this shit on you too?”, and then my eyes focused on the bookshelf behind the the book I was holding, full of similar books. Doh!
He later left them and helped start an early forum for xjws. I’ve known a number of very smart people who have left cults.
I don’t know that I would describe JW as a cult. They don’t seem to resist people leaving all that much, and, in fact, as with my friends, they sometimes kick people out. And I have one friend now who is JW and I just don’t think her behavior fits that of a cult member. Fringe fundamentalist Christian sect? Sure. Cult? If it is, then I think you’d have to classify most Christian denominations as cults. Hell, JW have been classified as a cult by more mainstream Christian denominations for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with actual cult behavior, including their theology. Specifically, that they are unitarian rather than trinitarian.
