[achtung]

Have to say I agree with the kid. While I didn't get all huffy and puffy when I had to sit through prayers in a public school, I wondered how it could possibly represent separation of church and state every time. It's not specifically Christianity that could be the transgressor in this sense, it could be any religious belief, but the mentality behind it is far from proper. Imagine how almost all of the folks involved in this would be screaming at the top of their lungs if they were being forced to sit through Muslim salah.

He tried to be discreet, his name was leaked. He was harassed by his peers because he thought differently than they did. He was kicked out by his family because they are close-minded dopes. (Unfortunately from what I understand of modern Christian fundamentalist social structure, this sort of behavior towards those who throw off the belief is practically expected.) I saw plenty of the exact same thing when I was in High School at home; gotta love pack mentality. The only anti-religious sensationalism here appears to be the news article.

[Flipside]

One word of advice. Let's play nice here.

There's one thing I would not say of Battuta, it's that he's suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes.

If people cannot discuss this issue without insinuations or personal attacks, it will get locked. If I am unprepared to accept Cavuto marks as an acceptable form of debate then I cannot accept this either.

[General Battuta]

What happened to the kid is terrible and stupid and clearly wrong.

It just doesn't have much if anything to do with American Christianity. Did you know that most black people live in Africa in underdeveloped nations? Black people cause underdevelopment!

[MP-Ryan]

I know it's going back a few pages and is tangential, but I'd like to point out that the account of Rosa Parks on the bus is a huge piece of revisionist history.  Parks was involved in an rights group for some time which was planning an action in a public place to make the point for quite some time.  Rosa did NOT perform her act of civil disobedience spontaneously, or as some humble folk hero.  While she served as a media catalyst for the civil rights movement, it was a very intentional action and not the spontaneous bit of folklore that history likes to portray it as.  (It's surprising how little of this is known, despite a very public record of her actual participation.  I only discovered it myself when writing a paper for a sociology class on power dynamics, which led me to revise my key argument )

Sorry for the digression, just figured I should point out that Parks should not really be the focus of any discussion of non-activist participation in a rights group.

[Luis Dias]

One word of advice. Let's play nice here.

There's one thing I would not say of Battuta, it's that he's suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes.

If people cannot discuss this issue without insinuations or personal attacks, it will get locked. If I am unprepared to accept Cavuto marks as an acceptable form of debate then I cannot accept this either.

Clarification:

1. The Dunning–Kruger effect is something that happens to *all humans*. It's part of the human condition. It was just easier to spot in less intelligent people, because there were smarter people to compare them to, but that does not mean that this is a condition of "stupid" people. Thus it is not an insult, but an accusation that the person speaking was probably even unaware of why the fuss is all about, which is clearly evident;

2. The person in question is not Battuta, but MJN;

Saying that someone is suffering from DKS is saying that they are having a blind spot in their reasoning. Again, it was not intended as an insult, but if it was perceived as such, I'm sorry.

[MP-Ryan]

What happened to the kid is terrible and stupid and clearly wrong.

It just doesn't have much if anything to do with American Christianity. Did you know that most black people live in Africa in underdeveloped nations? Black people cause underdevelopment!

It is astonishing how frequently that correlation/causation paradigm needs to be rehashed around here.

The actions of the community, in this case, are much more attributable to human psychology than they are to religious belief.

[General Battuta]

The actions of the community, in this case, are much more attributable to human psychology than they are to religious belief.

Word up, social science.

[MP-Ryan]

The actions of the community, in this case, are much more attributable to human psychology than they are to religious belief.

Word up, social science.

Join my groupthinking fistbump, or else.

[StarSlayer]

What happened to the kid is terrible and stupid and clearly wrong.

It just doesn't have much if anything to do with American Christianity. Did you know that most black people live in Africa in underdeveloped nations? Black people cause underdevelopment!

It is astonishing how frequently that correlation/causation paradigm needs to be rehashed around here.

The actions of the community, in this case, are much more attributable to human psychology than they are to religious belief.

To be fair though, follow the rabbit hole deep enough and everything can eventually be blamed on human psychology.  If an institution has bred a mindset where its followers are going to rabidly turn on an outsider, then there is a flaw in the institution.  The fact that the flaw is a product of our limited monkey brains doesn't mean the issue can't be addressed.

[Luis Dias]

Again, that's the easy cop out. Every bad action can be "more" attributable to human psychology than anything else.

This does not excuse the existence of social paradigms (like religion) that constantly harrass free thinkers for their heresies.

The only way to "change" the psychology in action that is so "attributable" is to tame religion to the point where people get to understand the difference between their metaphysical beliefs and the nature of the state. The only way to do so is to confront religious people with these problems and confront them with what appears to be the usual "She's raped because she's a slut" mentality (which was ****ing obvious in this thread, let alone in the mentioned town).

Until they acknowledge there's even a problem, there's no getting around it. MJN apparently thinks that the proposal to get God out of the US dollar is an offense at his own freedom of speech! And we're talking about someone who is, to all my considerations, an intelligent man. So *out there*, it can get only worse.

[General Battuta]

To be fair though, follow the rabbit hole deep enough and everything can eventually be blamed on human psychology.  If an institution has bred a mindset where its followers are going to rabidly turn on an outsider, then there is a flaw in the institution.  The fact that the flaw is a product of our limited monkey brains doesn't mean the issue can't be addressed.

Sure, I don't disagree with that at all. I think it almost certain that this whole affair was triggered by these people's religious beliefs.

Unfortunately, it takes a lot of training to clamp that statement down to what it actually means and place it in the context of a socioeconomic system. Go the other way and you end up like the religious-atheist loons that pop up around here.

[MP-Ryan]

To be fair though, follow the rabbit hole deep enough and everything can eventually be blamed on human psychology.  If an institution has bred a mindset where its followers are going to rabidly turn on an outsider, then there is a flaw in the institution.  The fact that the flaw is a product of our limited monkey brains doesn't mean the issue can't be addressed.

No one is saying the problem shouldn't be addressed - it's just silly to blame a huge, diverse institution for the perversion of its belief set by a fairly small number of individuals operating under essentially human conditions.  Seeing as most religious have tolerance and respect for other humans as their core tenets, it's foolish to blame the religion when the cause is human psychological wiring.

We are hard-wired to create outgroups.  It's how we've survived as a social species.  This behaviour isn't a product of religious teaching, it's a product of social psychology.  Treating the religion isn't going to correct the problem - it exacerbates it.

[mjn.mixael]

The actions of the community, in this case, are much more attributable to human psychology than they are to religious belief.

Word up, social science.

Join my groupthinking fistbump, or else.

That was pretty much the point of my posts, I guess I just wasn't clear enough.

Also,i said many posts ago, that those people had no Biblical basis for their actions. So blaming all of Christianity doesn't make much sense.

[MP-Ryan]

Again, that's the easy cop out. Every bad action can be "more" attributable to human psychology than anything else.

All human actions are fundamentally derived from human psychology.  Makes a lot more sense to address the problem at its root than take the easy route and blame <insert social institution here>.  Blaming religion is the facile recourse of those who fail to recognize the same social reflexes in themselves as those they attempt to critique.

[Luis Dias]

It may "exarcebate it" just like the civil rights movement "exarcebated" violence between ethnics. But you are missing the bigger picture.

You are saying that this isn't the product of "religious teaching", but it is connected to. "Religious teaching" tells you that the only way to envision the universe is with christian lenses, that the US is a "nation under god", and we frequently hear (even presidents!) that only god believers are "true americans".

Of course we can blame our mammal brain for this stuff! But until someone gets to replace everyone's brain with something more civilized, we are stuck with dealing with these tribal brains and inform them that their own vision of the country and the universe does not give them unconstitutional rights, that there is something called a "wall of separation between state and religion", that we should all cherish it, for the alternative is to descent into real deep unfree darkness.

But to me to underline this issue, to say to religious people, "look your religion has a problem here", is the real problem now, dontchaknow? The problem is these "religious-atheists loons" who dare speak their minds, unlike those quiet and well-behaved atheists who don't care about their rights being tossed out the window. Those are behaving correctly and should be applauded I guess.

[MP-Ryan]

You still don't get it.  This situation has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the individual was an atheist and the community rallied around purportedly-religious principles.  That's an aside, easily corrected.  The legal correction in this case would be legal action in accordance with constitutional law.  That's easy.

What's problematic in this case is commentators clamoring to blame the religious institution [Christianity] rather than the actual problem - people.  To repeat myself from two posts up, blaming religion is the facile recourse of those who fail to recognize the same social reflexes in themselves as those they attempt to critique.

[StarSlayer]

To be fair though, follow the rabbit hole deep enough and everything can eventually be blamed on human psychology.  If an institution has bred a mindset where its followers are going to rabidly turn on an outsider, then there is a flaw in the institution.  The fact that the flaw is a product of our limited monkey brains doesn't mean the issue can't be addressed.

No one is saying the problem shouldn't be addressed - it's just silly to blame a huge, diverse institution for the perversion of its belief set by a fairly small number of individuals operating under essentially human conditions.  Seeing as most religious have tolerance and respect for other humans as their core tenets, it's foolish to blame the religion when the cause is human psychological wiring.

We are hard-wired to create outgroups.  It's how we've survived as a social species.  This behaviour isn't a product of religious teaching, it's a product of social psychology.  Treating the religion isn't going to correct the problem - it exacerbates it.

I suppose it matters where you define the difference between core tenets and practice.  I generally find pretty much every religion can be distilled down to a similar benign core rule set.  Its my opinion that providing law before laws and judiciary existed to be one of religions' core purposes.

That doesn't change the fact that it has a long storied history of suppressing/ostracizing outsiders.  An edict by the Pope to go retake the holy land from the heathen Muslims, while motivated by greed and politics is still an act of the church.  Certainly the zealots on the pointy end of the Crusade certainly thought they where doing God's will. 

[General Battuta]

The problem is these "religious-atheists loons" who dare speak their minds, unlike those quiet and well-behaved atheists who don't care about their rights being tossed out the window. Those are behaving correctly and should be applauded I guess.

Haven't seen any of those yet.

[MP-Ryan]

That doesn't change the fact that it has a long storied history of suppressing/ostracizing outsiders.  An edict by the Pope to go retake the holy land from the heathen Muslims, while motivated by greed and politics is still an act of the church.  Certainly the zealots on the pointy end of the Crusade certainly thought they where doing God's will.

Again, none of this is a quality unique to religious institutions.  They're represented best in the written historical record because they have a long written history (actually, until very recently, the sole source of written history), but it doesn't make any particular religion the worst offenders.  People have been doing this sort of thing since well before people actually existed in our current species.

All social species do this sort of thing.  Though I still think bonobo's have the best resolution mechanism of any of us

[Luis Dias]

What's problematic in this case is commentators clamoring to blame the religious institution rather than the actual problem - people.

Why is it problematic for people to appear and try to propose that there is something rotten in religion itself that creates these issues?

You don't agree, that's fine, but why the **** is it so problematic?

Mind you, you said that "what is problematic here" is us, basically. Which is bull****, since I never deprived anyone of living their lives as they wished, nor did I expelled anyone from school for their beliefs, nor did I ban anyone from their rooftop because they dared make a courageous political point.


It's always the same bull****. When the cartoons appeared, which enfuriated a large part of the muslim community and a small part of it burned embassies and people over it, the problem wasn't the vandals and the barbarians, it wasn't the dogmatic idiocy of the religion, no, the problem were the cartoonists, something that most european politicians agreed to, just like the pope, etc. The problem wasn't the bullying, the killing, the inquisition that was formed against the heresies, the problem was those pesky free people and their cartoons.