(November 15, 2021 at 7:46 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: That's a pretty good way of putting it. Still..they don't recognize each other..but they also don't appear to be capable of recognizing themselves. Protestants gripe that catholics don't get their christianity from magic book, for example. Well..neither do protestants. What's the problem, right? I wonder if the reported lack of confidence might boil down to having too many principles and beliefs observed to be in conflict with themselves and/or with reality for a person to feel secure.
There's a related phenomena, called intentionally confusing dogma. You read about it in cult studies. This is where the dissonance a person feels when apprehending their religious ideology is a feature, not a bug. Sometimes...in an effort to produce insight that might otherwise evade our conventional thoughts, but more commonly, as a lever of control. Insecure people seek the permission of authority.
What's fun, is that when we say it's to do x, or do y, we're describing the intent of the cult progenitors...but it's not necessary for anyone to do this on purpose. Identical circumstances can be arrived at through composite construction of a faith tradition - as was the case with abrahamic theology. When a person considers their religious parents, it may also be the case that producing insecurity wasn't the intention, merely an effect, but that the effect is so useful to parents as authority we let it slide. Better that our son worries about going to hell for smoking meth - than smoking meth. Better that our daughter feels insecure in her decisions than that she feel completely sure of her soon-to-be mistakes.
Interesting. Well if we're talking about cognitive dissonance, that's actually what brought me out of Christianity in the first place; I wish I could say it was because of critical thinking like you guys, but that only came after. At school I was an insufferably stubborn Christian with an answer for everything and none of it good, I imagine. I can still picture the look of frustration and rolling of the eyes of one of my atheist friends, or friend-of-friends... he wasn't particularly close... at the time. Since then I've always wished I could meet him again to tell him 'you were right about two things; Nintendo is better than Sega, and there is no God'
As for actually coming out of Christianity, I still remember exactly where I was and when (in a certain classroom at college, age 18) I had the light bulb, and unprovoked, realisation 'there is no God' and everything changed after that, and all cognitive dissonance was gone.As to the rest of my family, if I had their purported beliefs, I'd have a lot of cognitive dissonance, but they don't seem to... or they hide it well... or it's just them being stubborn like I was. But then I doubt whatever cognitive dissonance they have would push them over the brink, because they can easily suppress (ie not think about) the contentious issues... like questions of evolution vs creationism etc... the power of compartmentalisation... but that wasn't possible for me because my main conflicting issues - ie being gay on the one hand vs being told I was evil for something I had no control over - were not something I could just push to the back of my mind.
