The transparency project
One reason religion is not good for women.
God represents an absent, unknown, unknowable, unaccountable, arbitrary power – which makes God a tyrant. To quote from the book, it’s a bad principle to expect humans to obey a putative god that is inaccessible and unknowable, just as it
would be to expect us to obey human legislators who were equally
hidden and unknowable and unaccountable. The God of most believers is a God that no one has
ever seen, that does not make appearances, that sends no messages;
this God is hidden, secretive, permanently and inviolably locked away
from all living people; this fact alone is enough to disqualify it as a source of laws or morality.
It’s surprising, in a way, that so many people are happy to take orders from an unavailable unaccountable God; it’s especially suprising in the case of people who are consigned to inferior status by that unavailable unaccountable God. Habit, custom, training, and inertia explain a lot, but it’s still surprising.
Hmm. I’d never thought of the parallels between the European Union and religion.
Hidden, unaccountable and unknowable.
Not to say, deranged.
Thank you for that.
Maybe God’s alarm clock failed to go off; a common enough cause for not turning up at work. Or excuse.
Whatever. Perhaps its time for statues of God, say one in the centre of every town and city, in a drive to make God more visible. I think even atheists might support that, just because of the huge role that God has played one way or another in human history.
Spinoffs: work for designers, sculptors and hordes of assistants; economic stimulus.
I think that you’re supposing that most people reason about their way of life as you do. They don’t. In your last paragraph, you list what motivates most people: habit, tradition, custom, training, inertia, and in addition, conformity to what others around them say that they believe.
Definitely atheists would support that – we’d be so curious to see what the statues loooked like.
“I think that you’re supposing that most people reason about their way of life as you do.”
No, but I am supposing that people who explicitly defend theism and religion think about theism and religion – but I notice that they generally don’t, and that they simply assume they know things that they don’t know.
Actually, by “reasoning about their way of life”, I meant something close to what you say: “think about theism and religion” (as a way of life). What keeps them from thinking isn’t so much assuming that they know things that they don’t know (it isn’t that explicit or conscious: it’s not an epistemological problem). Rather, it’s, as you say, tradition, habit, custom, inertia, etc.
Well yes but when pressed people do often assume they know things they don’t know. This is probably more true of people who do follow strong (not to say reactionary) rules, which are the ones I was expressing surprise about.
It surprises me that you have this kind of discussion without mentioning the mechanisms by which people submit their thinking capacities to others, so beautifully described by Robert Cialdini. The obvious ones are ‘Authority’ and ‘Committment and Consistency’, but there are whole interlocking ways that his six categories of influence triggers make people stronger in their religion.
It surprises me that you make this kind of point without noticing that it’s a short post and thus grasping that I was probably attempting to boil the thought down to the bare bones.
The statue? But we already know what that would look like.
http://christopherscottrice.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/fsm.jpeg
‘you make this kind of point without.. grasping that I was probably attempting to boil the thought down to the bare bones’
Pointlessly waspish OB-and far from ‘bare bones’ For starters, your comments are applicable to both genders, why start by implying applicability to women only? Men are also worthy recipients of your surprise.
Your pages would benefit from some more constructive discussion on the subject of promoting an alternative secular moral value set. Something less imperfect(?) than Christianity.
Sigh.
‘Waspish’ because ChrisP has a habit of arguing at a diagonal to what I’ve said. Why women is because I’ve just co-written a book on the subject. My pages have some more constructive discussion on the subject of promoting an alternative secular moral value set, just not this particular page, which represents just ten days out of a single month.