| tim Josling 2008-01-15, 7:55 am |
| On Mon, 14 Jan 2008 07:45:19 -0700, Howard Brazee wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 20:14:46 -0600, Robert <no@e.mail> wrote:
>
>
> Absolutely. I keep seeing arguments about how bad people are who have
> this religion or that one or no religion. But I look around and see
> people of all categories with members doing good and with members doing
> evil. Sometimes religion or patriotism or some other -ism is used as
> an excuse, but in the real world we see the behaviors nevertheless.
>
> Just because some Preacher or Priest or Ayatollah or atheist or patriot
> does evil or good doesn't mean that his whole group is evil or good.
I hesitate to mention this but here goes... in one of John Bradshaw's
books he quotes a study about the nature of religious adherence. This was
done in the US from memory and did not seem to have any particular agenda
as far as I could see. The study found religious people were mostly in
three broad categories. The impact of religion on behaviour varied by
category. I think a lot of confusion about the impact of religion on
behaviour stems from failure to distinguish different sub-groups of
adherents.
Convenience:
Those who professed religion for reasons of advance or convenience. "In
this town you can't get ahead if you don't belong to xxx:. These were about
40-45% of all religious people. Religion did not affect these people's
behaviour much, unless people were watching. Some of these people were
decent people and other were not. Whether people behaved badly depended
mostly on what type of people they were. I would probably put a number of
politicians in this group. Can there really be only 1 atheist out of 550
members of congress?
Comfort:
Those who found that religion gave them a comfortable feeling that they
were good people, or that they would not really die, or that life is not
meaningless, or that their life is not a pointless farce. This is the group
that by and large attends church on Sunday and behaves as usual the rest
of the w . By and large, these people did not much change their
behaviour as a result of their religion. Again, about 40-45% of the flock
are in this category.
Whether this lot behaved badly depended largely on their capability for
self-deception. People in this group can tend to believe "We're good
people so what we do must be good". This can make them blind to the bad
things they are doing. Perhaps some of those currently involved in
authorising torture and detention without trial may be in this group.
True believers:
These are about 5-10%. There are subcategories here too. Some are
dogmatic and do not question or work on their beliefs in any meaningful
way. Others do examine themselves more rigorously and thoughtfully.
Whether these people do bad things is dependent on how detached from
"normal evident concrete reality" they are. For some true believers, the
religious beliefs can become more real than the evidence of their own
eyes. These are the ones of whom Richard Dawkins noted that religion can
make good people do bad things.
Others are more aware of the limits of human knowledge and the extent of
human fallibility, and temper their enthusiasm with some pragmatism.
Possibly burning a witch to death may save her from eternal damnation, but
maybe I'm not sure enough to actually do it.
It would be interesting to do a similar analysis of non-believers. I would
suspect some just don't care about other people's opinions, some feel they
can succeed without playing the game, some just don't think the evidence
stacks up, others have never thought about it.
Some people don't have much of a spiritual impulse. I remember reading
about Temple Grandin (who has Aspergers syndrome) in the book "An
anthropologist on mars". She does did not understand what people are
talking about when they stand at the top of a mountain at sunset and feel
something special or spiritual. Perhaps that sort of ultra-g /
semi-aspergers brain does not have much room for religion for some reason.
There do seem to be a lot of gs who espouse atheism. In my experience
gs are very honest people (generally) so maybe it's partly that fewer
of them are fake adherents than in the general population.
Tim Josling
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