Sweet site dude, check out mine when you get a min……

I guess I say ‘catering to extremes’ because a devout Christian would clearly find it blasphemous and offensive. It’s one thing to disagree with someone and say that you think their beliefs are unfounded, and another to take their sacred things and make fun of them. One’s respectful, the other’s not, and, even if it’s not always the best approach, I prefer the respectful approach (assuming I can manage it).

So, by extremes, I guess I mean that the humour exemplifies an approach to dealing with other people’s beliefs that I see as further from the middle than the one I aspire to follow.

I like your point about racism and nationalism perhaps being part of the source of in-group/out-group attitudes shown in the study. Maybe a way I could have presented my original point would be to have said that perhaps people who are strongly group identity driven are more likely to be religious as this offers them another reinforced group within which to define themselves, hence the correlation..

I can’t say that I’ve ever seen this strong in-group/out-group mentality in any religious groups other than fanatical evangelical Christianity or in people who feel strong ties to one of the sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Which certainly does explain the. However, in my work I’ve never met anyone in a mainline Christian, Jewish, or Islamic organization who is ‘particularly passionate about,’ or even considers there to be at all, an in any way significant religious ‘group distinction.’

However, I also think race and nationality have an equal part in the in-group/out-group dichotomy held by the conservative white evangelicals creating these results.

I’m not sure if OS-fanaticism ever goes quite to the extreme of approving torture of the other group ;). Although I agree with your point that it’s less about whatever the supposed distinction is and more about how strongly the distinction is felt and how insular the group is and how threatened the group feels.

Oh, I don’t particularly think that article is catering to any extremes. Only to people who have actually been following politics and reporting for the past few months. Well, that may be an extremist group. But it’s just a commentary on Republicans reflexively, and often hypocritically, opposing nearly every action on the part of Obama, with a few snarky remarks referencing specific incidences.

Maybe I went a little too far by saying ‘often’, but it’s hard to dispute that there exist a large number of religious sects that are both insular and anti-egalitarian.

I completely agree that this has nothing to do with religion as a meta-physical or moral proposition, and since I didn’t claim that, I don’t know why you’re mentioning it.

My point is that religion is a group distinction that people feel particularly passionate about, which accentuates in-group/out-group behaviour. I’d argue that it’s this passion that explains the results in the post, not the religion.

None of this was reflexive, defensive, or even aggressive. Nor was it religion-bashing so much as an attempt to explain an empirical result through a social mechanism which religions often possess. I wouldn’t be surprised if fanatical sports-fans showed a similar survey result. Similarly, radical atheists, OS-fanatics, or even political radicals. I’m saying that it’s a part of human nature.

Please, try to read what someone’s saying before attacking them - I completely agree with your general point about hyper-aggressive atheism being mis-guided.

Yeah, that article’s a good example of humour catering to the extremes. Makes me uncomfortable, regardless of which group is dreaming it up.

I don’t believe this is what I was doing at all. I wasn’t criticizing Buddhism; I was criticizing people who claim to be rejecting poor philosophical theories like theism but who then seemingly unthinkingly agree with much of Buddhist philosophy. There is a reason you can only study Buddhist philosophy at the UW in the religion department; because it is really, really bad philosophy.

Meditation is certainly great, although historically it is hardly an exclusively Buddhist practice; nearly every religious tradition in the world has a history of meditation, although historically that aspect of the tradition has been much more central to Buddhism than to, say, Christianity.

I never condemned Buddhist techniques, and I certainly never condemned them because they are associated with the Buddhist religions. I am simply suggesting that it is highly hypocritical or unthinking of people who claim to reject religion because of reason to then accept an entirely different system of poor philosophy. Excluding the few strange metaphysical aspects of original Buddhism as espoused by the Buddha (although this is somewhat kind, as I have seen many atheists accept these), you are essentially left with a system of ethics, one that no sane modern day philosopher holds anything close to. Even the most basic precept of Buddhism, human teleology ought to be eliminating duka, is simply wrong. Although I really would rather not go into a lengthy philosophical/ethical/metaethical debate.

If, however, you believe in meditation as a good practice because of your own personal experience with it and because of the numerous studies showing its vast benefits, that’s not being a Buddhist, that’s being a completely rational modern-day humanist.

“That is, religiousness is often realized in insular, anti-egalitarian groups who are likely to those from the out-group as being less human (in a moral sense), and thus not subject to the rules in the same way. Even moderate religious groups tend to have quite strong group identity that fits them into this argument.”

That has absolutely nothing to do with religion as a metaphysical or moral proposition, and nearly every modern religion stresses the equal value of every human being
The derogatory views that are often found in the atheist community that religion is a primitive, clannish, close-minded, obscure system of beliefs explaining why the in-group is special are, to put it gently, simplistic, inaccurate caricatures, and it is just these sorts of views that give atheists their reputation for arrogance.

Human exclusivity, clannishness, in-group/out-group bias doesn’t have much to do with religion. It occurs with or without religion. After all, you’re clearly working with such a distinction, shown by your reflexive, defensiveness-through-aggression religion-bashing.

Amusing “news” story related to this post:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/1/726798/-BREAKING:-Obama-to-nominate-Jesus-Christ-to-Supreme-CourtRepublicans-Announce-Filibuster

That is, religiousness is often realized in insular, anti-egalitarian groups who are likely to those from the out-group as being less human (in a moral sense), and thus not subject to the rules in the same way. Even moderate religious groups tend to have quite strong group identity that fits them into this argument.

I very much doubt it’s a considered moral position, though, so it’d be interesting to see how religious groups have reacted to this result.

Thou shalt not kill, except for Philistines.

I don’t think this difference really has to do with being Christian per se, I think it’s more about being white and conservative and never having really gotten out of your small bubble of people like you, not really having a broad world-view, never having had the chance to learn to have compassion for people who are different.

That said, there are Christians who inexplicably espouse views that are horrifically anti-Christian/anti-morality-in-any-way-known-to-humans:

“God hates you… God can’t even look at us because he is so disgusted… You have been told that God is loving, gracious, merciful, kind, compassionate, wonderful, and good… That is a lie… God looks down and says ‘I hate you, you are my enemy, and I will crush you.’”

“A pacifist has a lot of difficulty reconciling pacifism with scripture.”

“After church tonight you will go home and you will eat chicken, not human, because of the spread of Christianity… go to a country where there hasn’t been the spread of Christianity and they’re having human for dinner.”

“Jesus is a God who hates.”

Singing: “Jesus hates me, it is so,…”

All Mark Driscoll, of course.