Bf and I disagree on religion

[Lonewing]

No, I still don't see why some people feel the need to look down on others for holding religious beliefs. Someone using religion to justify violence, sure, I understand judgment for that. But my personal beliefs hurt no one, and have no bearing on my intelligence or value as a person. No need for the snobby, holier and smarter than thou attitudes some non religious people display.

 

Ok, I'll provide another example.

 

Let us suppose there is a place where there are two camps of people, these who are theists and those who are atheists. Again, this is again a dichotomy of the hyperbole.

 

The theists demand that the educational system is used to emphasize faith and belief in invisibe forces to overcome great obstacles. The atheists demand an educational system that emphasizes the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Since neither camp can agree, the educational policy flops around between these two roots, hence there is no focus whatsoever for those who are in the system - for either teacher or student. For all that it is worth, ultimately a whole lot of time and energy is wasted on these silly debates - silly because the main issues in this hypothetical country include energy, clean water, and medical care. None of these problems are solved by the solutions provided by one of these two camps; the other camp has made more progress in less than 500 years than the former camp has made over 5,000 or perhaps 10,000 years. Do you see why one camp may look upon the other with disdain, or why one may look back upon the other with contempt?

 

Getting back to our Hyperbole, One day a great drought plagues the land. Droughts are nothing old, of course, for they have striken this land many times over the years. The theists are in charge at the moment though, so what does the governor ask his people to do? Why, pray for rain, of course!!! Hmmm...ok, so my hypothetical land may not be so hypothetical afterall...but I ask you, as a person who has access to meteorological data, to historical weather patterns, to the very history books of mankind, how might you view this "practical" solution, or even, perhaps, the people who hold this "solution" to the highest esteem and spend real money on a regional campaign to increase the the number of people actively participating in this "solution?"

 

And what would a scientist, and engineer, and a mathematician do instead? Hmm, let's see, We need water. Where's the closest free running body of water? We have a LARGE river flowing to the east, at a distance and an elevation not unlike the distances covered by the large canals networks found elsewhere in the country where persistent drought issues played havoc upon local economies until they took matters into their own hands. The obvious Technological solution, then, is to build a canal a couple thousand miles long, from that huge river where there is too much water to those places way out there where there is good land but no water, and never again is there another issue because of "no rain."

 

Does this make things clearer? I should add something here; in my tour of the academic world, I found very few theists in mathematics, physics, engineering, or any of the natural sciences. The most direct reason why is because these people literally do not have time for it. Now the greatest uproars I have ever seen were in the foundation level of biology as soon as we hit that great theory that causes so much disturbance. Suddenly a number of students, who had otherwise behaved so well up to this point studying the very comparative anatomy that is so central to this theory, became VERY upset and left the classroom, but not without first letting us all know very vocally about their SEVERE distaste for this subject.

 

The thing is, in order to get to med school, you must first pass biology. So if the one thing that stopped you from becoming neurosurgeon was your rejection of this theory at the infancy of your program, and you switch over to the field of psychology so as to ignore and escape this "problem," what is the balance of your value? Is a psychologist "worth" the same "value" as a neurosurgeon? i realize this is perhaps provocative, so we'll leave it alone.

 

In short, the "problem" with one belief versus the other belief is that one is Distraction to the cause of the other, depending on which camp you are in. And while you COULD be out spending your resources recruiting more people to your platform, or doing mission work, or spreading your ethic, you have to fight these nonbelievers who view YOUR system as a distraction to THEIR system! And while you may say, "oh, just ignore them!," the truth is, by ignoring them you are also accepting the steady loss of your parishioners! And with each person missing from your ranks, you no longer collect as much tithes as you did before - a vey real issue when you realize your system is as dependent upon it as their system.

 

Do you see now why an atheist may so harshly look down upon theists, and theists look so harshly down at atheists? It's a competition, an arms race, a very real battle of wits between a Man in Black and a Sicillian who thinks he's smart, but in reality is the inconcievable one who would hold a knife to Grace herself if it meant he would benefit by holding her hostage. The reality is, one camp has been steadily losing power and those people within that camp are quite upset about this. Afterall, their very belief system, to which they have held since they were very young, is under attack.

 

In short, they are being told "You're Wrong," a phrase which I would declare is quite easily the Most Offensive Phrase in our human dialog.

 

And they are fighting back by telling the second camp, "No, YOU'RE Wrong!" The second camp is full of those who are quite smug, quite arrogant, quite a number of things which we generally find distasteful [how can any human being hold himself higher than another human being just because he has more knowledge than everybody else???], and they're not often nice about it either. These things I acknowledge and indeed I have observed on a number of personal occasions. There is no black and white goodguy-badguy here. There is a basis to their fervor, a reason for their attitude; some of them have spent their whole life on their projects, so they are rolling in Blood Knowledge. To this group's astonishment, despite all the advances they have provided, they find the first camp is STILL quite popular so far up on a level so as to conflict with the process of transfering their knowledge to the next generation. Camp A can get away with 0.000001% shread of proof and the general public gives them a pass, while Camp B can get reliability up to 99.99999% and STILL be told that the 0.000001% event is still big enough to entirely undermine their whole platform.

 

I have one further thought about Why people may look down upon someone else's beliefs.

 

Thoughts lead to Beliefs, whereas beliefs are conclusions held based upon a prior thought. Beliefs begret further thoughts, which then begret words. Words lead to actions, actions lead to events, and a series of events leads to a lifetime.

 

The balance of your lifetime is determined by the beliefs you hold.

 

Now if you hold yourself to "the wrong beliefs," then your potential for that movement, whatever that movement may be, is lost. You may be the next Albert Einstein, but alas, because you have entertained "the wrong crowd," you are now a salesman of philosophy instead. OR while you could be the next great prophet, you aren't leading your people to salvation because you are stuck in a lab somewhere studying nanoshell treatments applied to cancer cells on the backs of rats. And then there are those who chose to be AB, and well, then you're looking at the man who spent his sociopolitical energy convincing the world that global warming is indeed true by applying theistic based thought processes to atheistic information. BOTH camps look down and laugh at him!!!

 

Beliefs are powerful things indeed.

[Lonewing]

The very BEST of luck to the both of you. I would hate to see an otherwise perfect lifetime together distraught by something so simple!! Although...it's not all that simple afterall, now is it??

[avman]

This is a religious debate. Thread closed.