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« on: January 15, 2008, 07:19:24 PM »
It's about time I wrote something for you guys on this topic, it just took Face's thread with the surreal quotes to get me going (Evoliotion haha). This is a difficult subject to tackle so bare with me.
First off, I am not writing this to attack religion. That's just stupid, attacking someone's beliefs is a tremendous waste of time and effort and never ends well, which brings me to my first point.
Generalization, we all do it. Let me begin by explaining why we do it. The main cause is attributed to the fact that human beings are lazy. I mean come on, if you had a remote control in hand, I'm pretty sure you would simply press a couple buttons to bring you to your new TV channel instead of walking up to the TV and manually changing the channels. But, flipping channels manually might lead to the discovery of something more interesting, or research or something. It's easy to forget the value of work. What does work have to do with generalization you might ask? Well, generalization is simply taking the entirety of a population and putting them in a bin labeled with "Stupid" or "Butts". Generalization never produces truth. You will always have a good amount of odd ducks that simply don't fit in your "Stupid" bin. But, making more bins will require much more thought, what to label those bins and who to put them in, and thus will require more work.
Now then, we will take a handful of people, specifically John, Bob and Puzman. All these people are from the same religion, John specifically is a prick (You know him at work) while Bob and Puzman are cool guys, but you have yet to meet these fine gents. John keeps boasting about his religion and what-not, and finally you make the easy, lazy assumption that everyone that follows John's religion is also a John-like prick without as much as a second thought. Now you meet Bob and Puzman, but they are from the same religion as John. You remember your generalization, which you would naturally not want to be wrong about, and you treat Bob and Puzman as you would John. You basically skip all the work of finding out who they are, if you can trust them, etc. You move directly to a verdict. Congratulation, you just generalized.
My next point is based on the fact that John boasts his religion like some rich bastard shows off his Ferrari. Religion is not the cause of anything. I can tell you this right away, the main cause of stupidity is the person him/herself. Religion is just a reason people will throw around, like a game of catch. There are countless people out there that don't give a damn about what others believe. They go about their lives, going to church, contributing to society, etc. Then you have those that tend to generalize a whole lot, and sure enough they have something against a certain classification of people. If these people happen to be "loud", getting their word across to others and basically ear raping them with it until it's all they can think about, then you have the possibility of something dangerous. You can also have non-religious, or people of a different religion doing the same thing.
These people are stupid, regardless of what their religion is. Their belief, that everyone who they suspect is like John and thus deserves some form of judgment/punishment, is messed up. No, I'm not saying Religion/science/whatever messed them up, that's just another way to throw that weight all over the place. It's just the way that the person was brought up, the collective of all the specific situations that the person has been through that makes him/her that way. When you think about it, religion in these cases is itself a victim, being used by some to promote their will onto others.
Feel free to comment, add your point of view to this. Contributions are welcome, albeit there is a difference between a contribution and an assault.
DRAMA
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