I love living in a society (or world for that matter) where the consensus is that you should by default have a religious faith of some kind (if you haven’t gotten the memo about that consensus just step outside and look around).
Some how in the rigmarole of it all NOT having a religious faith has been equated to having a faith of equal needsproofity. This not having a religious faith that i am referring to is commonly known as the definition of the term “atheism”. The “equal needsproofity” comes into play when someone says something like “well your position is just as irrational as mine so its just another faith blah blah blah”.
Society is set up like a market that is intended for religious customers. At this market there are booths set up with representatives from each religion of the world. I don’t know why, but it seems that by default EVERY patron of the market is considered that they MUST be religious PRIOR to entering the market (key word there is “prior”). This seems kind of odd to me. Not that religious people are going in, but that there is the assumption that you are considered to be religious prior to entry.
Allow me to put this in more practical terms. When your dad’s sperm and your mother’s egg met and fused, You were begun. You cooked for 9 months and when the timer went off, someone greeted you at the door of your cognitive thinking and said “welcome to [insert parent’s religion] son/daughter!”
Hang on a second there. Did your parents even give you time to visit the market? Did they even give you a chance to listen to the people standing out side the market who were saying “the people in that market have no evidence that their product works, not to mention whether or not its even real”?
[size=150]Welcome to Earth![/size] Where people make asses of you and me and everyone else without recourse to rational justification!
shrugs I think plenty of people don’t have any real religious faith. They’ve either dutifully adopted that of their parents (path of least resistence and all, if they have no opinion one way or the other, why not?) or they don’t mention it at all, after all, if they have no opinion why mention anything? I don’t spend hours talking about not collecting stamps, after all.
I disagree. Just because a person has been prematurely introduced to a paticular religion at the expense of not experiencing any others does not make that person less devout if they truly do embrace their first religious experience.
It’s almost like you are saying that faith can be measured in how hard it is to aquire or find. The search for a religion has nothing to do with the potency of the faith that may be exercized within it. That doesn’t make sense to me because Truth isn’t always in a well.
I can’t get the idea of arranged marriages out of my head, where two people cultivate and grow the love together, opposed to spending your whole life fretting, searching the perfect mate/religion.
That may be true and neither do I, but you can not deny the presence of people who DO collect stamps and their tendency to shove the stamp collecting handbook into public policy. When you approach a stamp collector they might try to convince you that collecting stamps provides a person with hope and meaning in their lives. If you ask them “what justification do you have for thinking that collecting stamps is a valid thing to do” and 99 times out of 100 they will respond with “why don’t you justify why you DON’T collect stamps! If you don’t collect stamps, how do you find meaning in your life?!? whats to stop you from raping and killing people!?”
If all religions were tought in schools, it may give the younger ones a way of thinking about religion. They may be inspired by another religion, or they may see how there are so many different religions and question religion in general.