Religious Discussion
Okay, so I've been terrible at updating lately. Sorry, but sometimes you get what you pay for. :)
Anyway, I was thinking about ways to make religious discussion more productive, and had one idea: Most discussions tend to focus on practical issues or logical inconsistencies that arise from the acceptance of a particular belief system. Instead, I would like to try starting as fundamentally as possible. Questions like "How well can we know anything?" and "What makes a belief system better than another, and should objectivity matter?" might be useful.
There's a decent chance that it will just make people defensive about the fact that they haven't thought about those things, but you never know.
Anyway, if you want to discuss such things, especially if you are religious, please let me know so I can test this idea.
Anyway, I was thinking about ways to make religious discussion more productive, and had one idea: Most discussions tend to focus on practical issues or logical inconsistencies that arise from the acceptance of a particular belief system. Instead, I would like to try starting as fundamentally as possible. Questions like "How well can we know anything?" and "What makes a belief system better than another, and should objectivity matter?" might be useful.
There's a decent chance that it will just make people defensive about the fact that they haven't thought about those things, but you never know.
Anyway, if you want to discuss such things, especially if you are religious, please let me know so I can test this idea.
posted by Gideon Humphrey at 11:14 AM
8 Comments:
Along the lines of "how well can we know anything" would be the discussion of how well one knows their own belief system. It's surprising to realize that many people have only a cursory knowledge of their belief system, and most believe only what they have been told (or brought up to believe) and haven't bothered to research it themselves. This might be a hard path to follow as the shields will go up pretty fast but if a person isn't willing to take a critical look at their own beliefs then it begs the difficult question - "Do you really believe it?".
Agreed. I suppose in some ways the question is "how do you get someone to take a critical look at their own beliefs when they don't want to?", which boils down to "how do you get someone to do something they don't want to?" If it's even possible, it's not an easy thing to do.
On how well one knows one's own belief system: there's an added level of complexity in that people not only fail to interrogate what we've been told, we also fail to interrogate ourselves over time. A belief system that was perfectly adequate to our understanding last year might fall apart this year under the stress of new life experiences--but we might not notice, if we aren't diligent about asking ourselves. We (people in general) tend to repeat answers we've already given. How do we get ourselves and others to keep checking in, keep asking difficult questions and keep trying to integrate the new things we've learned?
An excellent point. My personal response used to be to roughly annually tear down my beliefs entirely and start from scratch. I suppose I've gotten lazy after several years resulted in the same things though.
The pace of change gets slower as we age, usually... but then I think it makes it harder to recognize when change has occurred, because it isn't the landmark volcanic kind of change it used to be. Case in point was when I realized I had become an atheist, instead of an agnostic. On thinking back, I'd been one subconsciously for at least a year, but during that time I would have still said I was agnostic to anyone who asked. I didn't think to ask myself earlier because I didn't think anything had happened to me that year. You know, I was just working and hanging out with friends and no one died and not much happened in the world. But somehow this change was happening under my skin. I lost the feeling that there might be something out there, and gained a certainty that there was not.
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