Post by the sandman on Nov 1, 2010 7:59:14 GMT -5
Do these emotional appeals even actually work on most victims in the long run? I seem to remember them as a large part of the reason I left Christianity in the first place.
All religions and religious faith requires a certain measure of irrationality to be accepted, and since you can never get someone to accept irrationality through logic and reason, you must rely on abstract, philosophical arguments and emotional appeals.
That said, it is entirely possible to push the insistence of irrationality too far, and require the faithful to endlessly struggle to prevent the entire belief structure from collapsing; Sisyphus mindlessly pushing the boulder up the mountain for eternity. When a religious structure reaches this saturation level of irrationality, all dissent and questioning must be immediately and thoughtlessly crushed lest it worm a crack into the bedrock of the faith. All evidence, no matter how solid, must be attacked unceasingly lest the faithful for a moment consider it as valid, because a moment is all it takes to bring down the house of cards.
And religions, being largely constructs of man (even in the event of a religion being valid, it would still primarily be a human conceit), become more and more complex, and therefore more and more irrational over time as various leaders and "prophets" add, alter, mangle, and twist the original kernel of irrationality into a monstrous, wild beast serving their own needs and prejudices. This inevitably happens.
Which is why, if you are going to be religious, if you are going to hold religious faith as a thinking human being, it is vitally necessary that you do not simply blindly accept the doctrine of the political church body you associate with. You must approach religious faith with your eyes open, and not allow it to overwhelm your basic human faculties of reason and thought. If your religious conviction is directly contradicted by the reality of the world around you (like, say, a belief in a 6000 year old universe for example), you have to ask yourself: Which is more likely: that my personal, faith-based belief is in error or that the entirety of reality is in error?"
If you conclude that reality is in error, if what you experience in the world is inaccurate....it might be time to reconsider every aspect of reality, including the contents of the holy book you are following and the words of the preachers you are listening to. Because if your sense are lying to you about the contents of the fossil record, if the world is lying to you about the age of the Earth, then you must entertain the real possibility that your senses are also lying to you about the words contained in the Bible or the Koran or the Book of Mormon. Question reality: question all reality, not just the reality you find inconvenient.