Well…read an interesting study yesterday that compared how children raised in religious homes fared against those raised in secular homes in the necessary skill of discerning fantasy from reality….and the results explained a lot to me when they found that those raised in the strictest homes that teach their children that the bible is the word of god had a huge problem telling what is real and what isn’t since they are taught that that myth is truth….and, that explains why the religious adults on the right so happily believe the conspiracy theories and the lies that are spewed at them every day from the right wing media. I think this is the worst kind of child abuse that is covered by religion..who in their right mind would doom their child to a life without this critical thinking skill? Oh, that’s right, they don’t care about that…faith is all it takes for them in politics and economics…even when that faith is proven wrong on so many fronts…geez…
Tag Archives: faith
May 2nd, there may be some onion here…
Hmmmm…just made a pot of coffee and have a History channel show on called “Nostradamus 2012″ running in the background and that kind of fits with something I read in the Washington Post this morning. In an article called “Faith Without Religion”, Martha Woodruff attempts to define what her faith is to her and how she came to hold those views; trying to get discussion going on what faith is and how other people practice theirs. What was striking to me is in the comments that were published in response to the article and points out one of problems that I’ve written about in earlier posts: that the ability to listen to new ideas that are dissimilar to our own and talk about them rationally has disappeared in today’s society.
The two poles of the discourse were represented (although the defenders of organized religions outnumbered the non-believers by nearly 10-1) and were predictable with the atheists positing that any belief in an invisible super-being was delusional and the believers predictably arguing that they have the “correct” answers and beating her over the head with citations from the Bible. What really struck me was that most of the comments were there to try to convince the writer where she was wrong, not to have a rational conversation on what they have in common. Now, I’ll admit here that I grew up in a faith that I thought had some really great principles to live by and has partially shaped who I am today, but the idea of an all-powerful, invisible, super being that controls everything is just too juvenile to me, especially with what we know of how the Bible came to be and the superstitious nature of the times when it originated. Do we still believe in the medicine of that time?
Oh, the connection between the Nostradamus show and the discussion? Well…in the show they are taking all of the obscure and murky writings of Nostradamus and devoting two hours to speculation and interpretation; taking it seriously as science when it’s just a lot of bunk. Similar to what has been done with the Bible and faith. Just my opinion…no death threats please…