Religious Freedom

[tracilicious]

Originally Posted by Prudence

I can't speak for Wendybeth, but the reason I don't usually participate in these discussions is that, for the most part, the "other side" does NOT have a genuine curiosity to know how I think, except as a pretext for "demonstrating" how wrong I must be. Because the "other side" sees my beliefs as silly and fundamentally untrue, they are genuinely unable to prevent themselves from, in their minds, proving me wrong. The questions aren't so much "why do you believe that?" as they are "how can you believe that in the face of all this evidence I've decided proves your God doesn't exist?"

I'm having this same problem in reverse. The people I talk to about faith really have no motive other than proving me wrong. Except in my case, they are trying to prove that God does exist.

I'm cool with whatever faith people want to have. If it's something that works for you then great. Whatever makes your life richer. I just don't get the people that are so dead set on conversion. I used to be one of those people, and I still don't get it.

[tracilicious]

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

As Richard Dawkins has been so famously saying recently, everybody is an atheist for 99% of the gods, atheists just take it one god farther. I'm fascinated by the process in which non-atheists end up picking that one god (or god-system, to involve the polytheists), and then how all the ones that pick the same god manage to create nearly infinite variations and then start shooting each other over them.

Though I didn't see this in Wendy's posts, I'm curious about the same thing. So many people believe so strongly that there faith is THE faith and all others are laughably wrong. (This goes for lack of faith as well.) I'm not sure why they can't see that others are reading the same scriptures they are and have interpreted it differently, not because they are idiots, but because the nature of the scriptures lends itself to many different interpretations.

For the particular religion that I've been part of, they have many justifications for why they are right and everyone else is wrong. They never truly look for the other side of the coin though. I'm assuming it's that way for most devout faiths. Also, the admittion of possible error opens up an entire world of uncertainty that most wouldn't be comfortable with. Perhaps the community aspect of it comes into play as well. With the erosion of beliefs would come the erosion of the larger social group that they are part of. All their security would be lost.