Non sequitur On Steroids

[Truthseeker]

As I have stated before, I am a non-believer in the midst of dedicated believers all around me.  The past Saturday night my wife and I were having dinner with some friends.  I am the only one at the table going to hell.  The friends are not aware of my stance.

OK.  So my wife is pontificating about our sixteen year old daughter's cavalier attitude towards safety when she relays a story that takes place when she was in her early twenties, jogging at four in the morning. Part way through her jog a feeling that someone is watcing her befalls her.  In her mind this is god's proding to get back home.  She begins to pray "god, if you will just get me home safely I will never make this stupid mistake again."  Then the wife of the other couple jumps on that with another story of a woman (also a very dedicated Christian) who while shopping allowed her daughter to go right next door to the Burger King, despite her god inspired misgivings, never to be seen again.

Why, oh why, would this every loving and compassionate god wait until my wife was out jogging in the midst of danger to then give her the warning.  Then to be so scared that he would not protect her that she begin to beg him for protection.  What kind of a set up is this between a supposed father and child???????????

The second story has me so confused I do not know whether to scratch my watch or wind my ass.  Why would god allow any of that???
I just sat there is silent bewilderment at what I know to be otherwise rational, intelligent people.  What is it about religion that knocks so many people mentally off center?

Thank you for your indulgence.

[The Magic Pudding]

What is it about religion that knocks so many people mentally off center?

People want to be amazed. 
Many of them lead tedious little lives and seek some excitement.
Most people have biases that have them interpreting things a certain way,
although I don't fully understand this as I have none..
People do seek experiences that knock them off centre, drugs are another way.
People are strange.
 

[Sweetdeath]

The world sucks. Shit happens with no good reason. That's how i view life.
No one human is special or excluded from.danger. I have had terrible things happen to me and my friends. I dont think i deserved it. And yet some idiots think god allows these things to happen to seek a "higher truth" ?

Just, no.

[pytheas]

I am a non-believer in the midst of dedicated believers all around me.

Courage, stealth and iron-self confidence.
Survival means gargling with shit.
Good Living may mean changing Your situation, location, continent.

What is it about religion that knocks so many people mentally off center?

in sentiments ( for we all are made to be sentimental)= FEAR-INSECURITY
the context (for we all are made to be with some logic, some consciousness)= the contradiction of the UNKNOWN-UNPREDICTABLE with the crisp, high-definition, neatly square-bordered window of analytic understanding
the paradox to have
the need and some tool to understand(logic) on one hand
and
the evident overwhelming broadness of the universe here and now, on the other.

religion is philosophical suicide, driving your logic train to a wall, or actually a chasm as it attempts the "leap of faith" like over a non-existent bridge, just the gap to fall into

the need to understand can be moderated by drugs, yoga and a dedication in a hobby,work, love,  life itself

To embrace the unknown cool-headed, conscious and with knoweledge of your limitation, takes a lot of human essence.
that is rare and hence found in few and apart

[penfold]

I just sat there is silent bewilderment at what I know to be otherwise rational, intelligent people.  What is it about religion that knocks so many people mentally off center?

I'm not sure this is about religion as such. I think its a more general point about human nature. The reasons our brains are so useful is that they find patterns. This also leads us to make errors, and find patterns where there are none. The psychologist Skinner's experiments on pigeons show how easily irrational and superstitious behaviour arises http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner#Superstition_in_the_pigeon.

It is not just religious people who make this mistake. Think of the number of people who trust in horoscopes, homeopathy etc... All these are based upon the same kind of thinking as your friends' stories. They are not making some theological point about the nature of God, rather they are trying to find patterns that make sense of the, often terrible, chaos of our lives.

I have a friend, he has a gifted mathematical mind, is a staunch atheist and is, in most things, very rational. Yet he uses gambling machines and insists he has a system which allows him to win (something to do with the sequence of flashing lights). It's not just the religious who try to find superstitious narratives to explain random events...

[Truthseeker]

It's not just the religious who try to find superstitious narratives to explain random events...

I am in complete agreement and did not mean to imply otherwise.  Whether someone is trying to make sense of the chaos and turmoil in their lives, it just strikes as perplexing how nonsensical (I mean a childlike Santa Clause type nonsensical) otherwise rational, intelligent minds can operate.  Why are some of us able to peel away from this form of thinking and others are not?

Sorry if this sounds like I am reiterating what I have already said, but if I was walking alongside my daughter and she got the feeling that some hood rat was watching her she would think it absurd to have to ask me to protect her.  She does not have to ask.  It is completely understood in both of our minds.   

[Ecurb Noselrub]

Some of us have faith based on our own personal experience. When we hear other people's stories of horrible experiences, the first reaction may be "thank you God that this didn't happen to me." Then we attempt to find reasons why X happened to John but didn't happen to us.  The brain automatically makes stories, seeks distinctions, rationalizes. The faith itself is not questioned at that point because it is based on the personal experience of the person. But when tragedy strikes that individual, a test of faith occurs. Whether it survives depends on the previous strength of the personal experience.

In other words, the different reaction from believers can occur because of the perspective. The believer lives within his/her internal faith narrative. As long as things can be fit into that narrative, it survives. If something happens that destroys the narrative, it dies or is at least radically altered.  The strength of the narrative determines its survivability.  Someone who is not a believer and has no such faith experience doesn't understand the narrative, or is not interested in it.  It's similar to one person loving one particular book and another person hating it. Some narratives can take a lot of abuse.

[cgmccall]

Sometimes I think there's a sort of new...maybe "style" to faith. It's probably not all that historically new, but it feels that wa to me.
We live in a world with so much that's rational and precise: science, computers, the math the builds our spaceships, the tests that make our medicine. Thing is, our brains don't work like that; we don't calculate. As several of us here have said, there's an emotional component in our thinking that goes for satisfaction before accountability. Science is giving us more and more, and getting more acceptance, and it clearly rejects so many things cultures have held as important. Instead of trying to reason with it, and use science, people fight it.
It just seems that way to me sometimes. People are doubling up thier faith, not just because they're looking for things to reafirm the it, but to have a weapon against anything that threatens it. That's the new "style": find something that's spiritual and uplifting for the sake of fighting science's foothold on reality. There's something just so combative about so much faith these days.

[AnimatedDirt]

That's the new "style": find something that's spiritual and uplifting for the sake of fighting science's foothold on reality. There's something just so combative about so much faith these days.

Funny...I'm Christian and so somewhat biased.  I see it completely the opposite. 

[penfold]

Funny...I'm Christian and so somewhat biased.  I see it completely the opposite. 

It takes two to fight. My own feeling is that the 'new atheism' (I understand many reject the term) is pretty aggressive. Having said that the motive behind that aggression stems from legitimate concerns about how some religious groups have increasingly been attacking scientific knowledge.

I'm a religious studies and philosophy teacher teaching 16-18 year olds. I go out of my way (and off syllabus) to ensure that my students understand how science arrives at its conclusions. What I find depressing is how many students coming to the end of their studies suffer from a real confusion about these issues. More often than not the word 'theory' is taken to mean 'opinion' (as opposed to the correct definition of a proposition capable of falsification) etc...

Most religious people I know are perfectly happy accepting scientific knowledge and do not see it as impinging upon their faith. However there is a very vocal minority of theists who seem to think that science is merely 'one point of view' and should be taught as such. My guess is that these people have a very limited understanding of science themselves. The danger is that this becomes self-perpetuating; the ignorance of the older generation being foisted upon the young. To my mind the supposed 'religious freedom' of parents should never outweigh a child's right to an impartial education; and so I have a lot of sympathy with the likes of Dawkins and Dennet despite their belligerent style.

As with so much in life the quiet moderates get drowned out by the noisy fringes...

[Truthseeker]

Funny...I'm Christian and so somewhat biased.  I see it completely the opposite. 

It takes two to fight. My own feeling is that the 'new atheism' (I understand many reject the term) is pretty aggressive. Having said that the motive behind that aggression stems from legitimate concerns about how some religious groups have increasingly been attacking scientific knowledge.

I'm a religious studies and philosophy teacher teaching 16-18 year olds. I go out of my way (and off syllabus) to ensure that my students understand how science arrives at its conclusions. What I find depressing is how many students coming to the end of their studies suffer from a real confusion about these issues. More often than not the word 'theory' is taken to mean 'opinion' (as opposed to the correct definition of a proposition capable of falsification) etc...

Most religious people I know are perfectly happy accepting scientific knowledge and do not see it as impinging upon their faith. However there is a very vocal minority of theists who seem to think that science is merely 'one point of view' and should be taught as such. My guess is that these people have a very limited understanding of science themselves. The danger is that this becomes self-perpetuating; the ignorance of the older generation being foisted upon the young. To my mind the supposed 'religious freedom' of parents should never outweigh a child's right to an impartial education; and so I have a lot of sympathy with the likes of Dawkins and Dennet despite their belligerent style.

As with so much in life the quiet moderates get drowned out by the noisy fringes...

Very well said penfold!  A true example of a maxim.

[pytheas]

When we hear other people's stories of horrible experiences, the first reaction may be "thank you God that this didn't happen to me."

The first reaction may also be to feel bad or sick-like out of empathy for the fellow human and offer some moral support or understanding

[Hector Valdez]

Oh, I cant top that. One time at work I felt certain that the devil was trying to enter my body, and I mentally screamed out, "Jesus! Save me!" and then I felt certain that he had saved me, or blocked the devil or something. I now realize it was all in my head, of course, but if I hadn't called out in that moment, I probably would have begun to act as if I was possessed or something.

Yeah...I could have stimulated the holywood production business by giving them another emily rose. Alas, now I must give them a kira, which I feel is inherently more superior and also entertaining.

[Velma]

Anyone out jogging alone at four in the morning is bound to have thoughts about safety, especially a woman.  I'm betting at some point her sense of self-preservation kicked in and started screaming at her "Hey, stupid, you're out alone at 4 am!"  She decided to interpret that as the voice of god.

The second story is a case of remembering the hits and forgetting the misses.  It was a horrible thing that happened to the girl, but I'm sure there were plenty of other times the mother worried about her daughter's safety and nothing happened.

[pytheas]

once younger I was swimming naked from one aegean island ano koufonisi to its sister island kato koufonisi, some 500 meters? half a mile at most of open aegean sea
i was accompanied by a free-roaming ferral shepperd dog

in the middle of the passage I started seeing shadows reflected beneath me in the glimmering sea waves and imagined the rare blue shark variety

I first briefly thought of a god to protect me but then as the shadows became more prominent I realized it was chemically induced paranoia and fought it by logic propabilities of the shark's true rarity and prayer to the only qualified deity of the moment FORTUNA inperatrix mundi, ie chance, luck.

if you have a statistical grasp of the situation then you can convince yourself to be on guard, or panic for exposing yourself too deep

jogging at 4am in new york's central park, or swimming in open seal territory of south africa with frequent white shark visitations is tempting your luck, and when stupidity or blindness is the reason, an appeal to gods promptly qualifies

anything less, is mouse insecurity, the civilised human totem