Polyintrinsic said:
See, the main flaw with talking to really religious people is that they don't believe in fact. Their whole belief system is based on something that they have been told to believe in, and not something that has evidence supporting it. When a logical person tries to bring facts into an argument against a religious person they don't understand its usefulness or purpose because its not relevant.
Usually they tend to get angry because in the argument you are trying to get them to see another side of a story, to get them to look beyond what they know, to push their boundaries of thought. For religious people this is very scary, therefore they react with anger. Religious people have been told what to believe their whole life, you can't just force them to think independantly because its like sheep without their shepard, they get lost and scared.Free or inspirational thought is something the church likes to suppress as much as possible, so trying to get an indocrinated person to think for themselves, to look for facts, or to challenge their beliefs is near impossible.
Disclaimer: This is just my experience in dealing with religious poeple. If you take offence to this post and are not a religious person, then I am sorry just ignore my post. If you take offense and are a religious person, I won't bother debating with you for reasons stated above.
I find that last paragraph interesting. You basically just equated religion with anti-intellectualism, and you don't want anyone to challenge you on it. Your perception of all religious people is conveniently such that you claim it wouldn't be worth discussing it with them. Good job remaining comfortable in your lack of understanding! *sarcastic thumbs up*
Look, you don't need to debate with someone about it, you just need to understand that you're generalizing here, and the resulting ideas are wrong. Some religious people have issues with that, true. But the amount is becoming less and less. Reason being, we live in a culture that is increasingly hostile toward religion; it's "tolerated" in the
actual meaning of the word, but generally made fun of in our culture based on sweeping generalizations like the ones you made here. Anyone growing up with, or accepting later in life, a given religion goes through a period in his/her life where they have to step back and take a serious look at what they believe and decide whether they actually believe it for themselves. Faith does play a role in a religion, but
rarely does it take an all-important one. You don't have to agree with any given religion if you don't want to, but to essentially say that anyone who believes in a given religion is against logical thought is more than a little much, and more than a little ignorant.
