Comments on: Compassion for the Religious

By: remuss

remuss — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 13:34:40 +0000

@4, 6, 7, and Greta 🙂 (Did I miss anyone?)

OK, Having thought about it some more, they’re not con-men. So, I was wrong.

By: enukt

enukt — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 16:15:14 +0000

Thank you for writing this, Greta.

By: Should atheists have compassion for the clergy? | Carolina Atheist

Should atheists have compassion for the clergy? | Carolina Atheist — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 18:51:45 +0000

[…] are sworn to uphold the tenets of their religion even if they personally might question them. As Greta Christina recently argued, it may not be right to ridicule a priest caught in a compromising (sexual) position. After all, […]

By: spitefulfox

spitefulfox — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 21:33:56 +0000

This article really spoke to me. I used to be a member of this cult called the Unification Church and after I had left, I had joined a group of other “Ex-Moonies,” but was always put off by how hateful everyone else was towards people associated with the cult, even though those people were just as much victims as we were. :/

By: Thumper; Atheist mate

Thumper; Atheist mate — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 14:40:58 +0000

I feel the hostile reactions came from the same sort of in group – out group hostility that first made me so disdainful of religion. The guy’s a priest, he’s “one of them”, so he deserved everything he got. It’s depressing to see such thoughtless othering from Atheists.

By: remuss

remuss — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 22:50:52 +0000

@16. Greta,
I was gonna reply to the previous comment, as stated earlier, but in light of 16 I will stop bloviating and mansplaining. We’re obviously on different pages (I’m not saying “Let’s agree to disagree,” I hate that), and your need for and right to a safe space to call your own overrides my need to explain my uncouth posts.

Should you find it necessary or right, feel free to remove my previous comments.

Have a good one.

By: Greta Christina

Greta Christina — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 21:42:19 +0000

I do find the mentality alien. It is. I don’t now nor never have had similar convictions. For the majority (entirety?) of my adult life I’ve not had religious beliefs. So, that kind of mindset is completely alien. I can’t fathom being like them.

remuss @ #15: Then in that case, I would strongly urge you to spend some time talking with them, or reading their writings. In particular, I would strongly urge you to read some of the writings of atheists who were once clergy people, such as the people in the Clergy Project: Theresa McBain, Seth Andrews, Catherine Dunphy, Jerry DeWitt. (Jerry Dewitt has an excellent new book out — “Hope after Faith: An Ex-Pastor’s Journey from Belief to Atheism” — that gets across both the intellectual and emotional reality of being a pastor.) Find out how these folks think and why they think it before you dismiss their mindset as “completely alien.”

Because — and I cannot emphasize this enough — THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS. Their mentality is not radically different from any other human mentality. The mental processes that lead them to believe in God and to teach others to believe in God — rationalization, confirmation bias, a tendency to see pattern and intention even where none exists, a tendency to believe what others around you believe and what authority figures tell you and what your parents taught you in your childhood, etc. — are mental processes that are universally human. These people simply apply these mental processes to a question that you don’t.

And you can’t dehumanize people and then say blithely, “but there’s no call to action behind it.” Dehumanization is an action. As someone who has been told that I’m less than fully human because of being queer, because of being female, because of being fat, because of being kinky — and yes, because of being an atheist — I can assure you that treating people as not fully human is an action… and it’s an action with serious, harmful consequences. And if you ever do it in my blog again, I will ban you so fast it will make your head spin.

By: remuss

remuss — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 20:41:28 +0000

@14. (I’ll address your other point later),
Greta,
Sorry if my language is inexact:
But, I do find the mentality alien. It is. I don’t now nor never have had similar convictions. For the majority (entirety?) of my adult life I’ve not had religious beliefs. So, that kind of mindset is completely alien. I can’t fathom being like them.
Now, you’ll notice that my observation, my comparison is just that. I don’t advocate action against them, and I don’t advocate harming them because I find them alien. I’ll give them a good verbal thrashing by pointing out their logical/moral/cognitive inadequacies, but that’s as “evil” as I’ll get.

Sorry if the language appears scary, but there’s no call to action behind it. I don’t find them any more or any less special than the majority of humanity, and I’m somewhat of a misanthrope. That doesn’t mean that I want all or most of humanity to go away, or any such thing. It just means that I find these particular individuals alien. (Funnily enough, I’m an alien in this country, so…)

By: Greta Christina

Greta Christina — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 20:25:23 +0000

As far as I’m concerned, priests might as well be aliens. I don’t share those convictions.

remuss @ #12: So now you’re dehumanizing them? You don’t share their convictions… so you don’t see them as human? They might as well be aliens?

Is that the morality that you think is so superior to religion?

By: Greta Christina

Greta Christina — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 20:21:44 +0000

remuss @ #10: I agree that priests bear a good amount of moral responsibility for the harm they do. But there is, in fact, a useful and important moral distinction between consciously and intentionally doing harm (such as a con artist swindling someone), and unintentionally doing harm (through an insufficiently rigorous pursuit of the truth, for instance, which is what I think many priests are guilty of). It’s the reason we have longer prison sentences for first-degree murder than for negligent homicide. When people use the phrase “con artist,” they generally mean the former — and it’s inaccurate to use it to describe the latter.

And even if we conceded that priests really are con artists… how is that relevant to the moral issue at hand? Do con artists not have the right to call 911 when they’re in physical danger, without being subjected to public humiliation for private acts?

And maybe more to the point: Is it really so difficult to be angry with people, and still feel empathy for them? Is it really so difficult to hold both emotions at once? Is it really so difficult to have some degree of moral nuance? Is it really that much easier — and is it any better — to just write people off as “con artists”? Isn’t this sort of all-or-nothing moral thinking one of the main things we object to so strongly in religion?