4 ms·

> Sometimes it feels like those with very strong faith inhabit a quite different world to me. Quite an understatement! I grew up in a hyper-religous secluded c

> Sometimes it feels like those with very strong faith inhabit a quite different world to me. Quite an understatement! I grew up in a hyper-religous secluded community overseas, and it was a huge perspective change to see what life is really like outside the bubble. Everyone around me seemed to truly believe that they were in a struggle against demonic powers for all that is true, good, and holy. We were constantly told if we stopped, the world would be plunged into a hellscape of wickedness and evil. Also that most other humans had literally allied with the devil and were actively trying to stop us. It's wild to write it out now, but that was just how it was. Teachers, parents, and other friends of mine all "knew" some humans were our active enemies, just like they "knew" that we were on the Right Side. Our side was "righteous". At 17 I moved to a major city in the US, I quickly realized how much of that was completely fabricated. People are all sometimes evil, just like they are sometimes wonderful, selfless, charitable, honest, and caring. I don't know a single person who has "allied with the devil to cast the world into darkness". Turns out that was just a terrifying fairy tale.

philwelch 3y ago
> I don't know a single person who has "allied with the devil to cast the world into darkness". Turns out that was just a terrifying fairy tale. It’s no fairy tale. There are people in this world who raise armies of child soldiers and engage in ritual cannibalism and human sacrifice. There are people who build concentration camps and gulags and torture the people imprisoned inside. There are serial killers and child sex traffickers. These people exist. In a modern Western society, we prefer to either live in denial about this or try and develop more sophisticated explanations for this kind of behavior, but there are centuries of intellectual development that needed to happen for us to get here. Most people throughout most of history made sense of the world through myth. If it helps, think of the devil as more of a metaphor. Though honestly, I think I would make a stronger statement than that. For instance, you can attribute some of this behavior to mental illness, but the concept of mental illness is also a metaphor with almost as many inherent flaws. And even framing these behaviors as mental illness doesn’t work in cases where these behaviors are completely normal to the societies in which they take place. Everyone agrees that Ed Gein was mentally ill because he lived in a culture where murdering women, wearing their skin, and dancing around wasn’t normal, but there have been cultures where human sacrifices with uncanny similarities in ritual have been completely normal. Psychologists and anthropologists have all kinds of theories and explanations for this sort of thing, but it’s not like they have it all figured out. We’re nowhere close to hard science when it comes to explaining this stuff. Besides, what is science anyway? It’s a set of models to help people make predictions. It’s not fundamental truth. F=ma is a lie that we tell children because unless you’re approaching the speed of light, it’s close enough to get you the right answers. And the psychologists were getting high on cocaine and making up wild theories about men wanting to fuck their mothers around the same time the physicists finally figured out that F=ma isn’t exactly right. It sounds like you grew up in a weird cult and I’m sympathetic to that, but it’s a mistake to overgeneralize that experience as an example of religious faith in general. There are a lot of religious beliefs that use a mythical framing to encapsulate essential truths about the human experience. Not only did we need that encoding to get where we are today, but in some cases I’m not even sure we’ve come up with any better explanations.
- JackMorgan 3y ago
  Mythical framing as way to explain humanity's evils is one thing. Stories from Beowulf to Superman tell of characters who are evil because of their actions, sometimes even trying to explain their motivations. We use these stories to frame why sometimes people do heinous acts. However, I've talked to thousands of Americans who truly believe that roughly half of Americans are in communication with the devil and are part of conspiracy to usher in Satan's reign. This has become a blind spot where wickedness in believers is excused because "they're on our side". Everything is framed in a cosmic scale war between good and evil. When someone "satanic" does a good thing it is waved away as just a ruse to somehow advance the forces of evil. Did "one of us" do something wicked? Well, in war sometimes you have to do hard things to get the job done. See recent examples of "Christian" politicians and religious leaders who are caught performing sexual assault, theft, bribery, miscarriage of justice, pride, or theft. The churches I grew up in don't even comment on these acts. They've turned entirely from "individuals vs their own sin" to "believers vs a made up demonic army". I've had opportunity to since travel to hundreds of churches along the East Coast and seen the same thing over and over. Some American churches haven't fallen into this weird demonic conspiracy theory, but I'd wager right now it's the majority of them. You'll hear them talk all day about sin, but always in a frame of "us vs them". I agree though, that in a historical sense, maybe we needed that explanation that sometimes people are wicked, and it's better to not be wicked. I'm not entirely sure though that religion is the only way those stories get told. Nor that religion has even measurably changed how much wickedness happens per capita. But as a reply to the OP comment, I think my comments still stand. Believers definitely inhabit a totally different world.
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    Are you a journalist?
    - JackMorgan 3y ago
      No, I was in seminary to be a preacher, and traveled a lot for that and other religious work. Also worked as the East Coast and TX recruiter for a religious school. Ended up not finishing and getting into software engineering.

philwelch 3y ago

> I don't know a single person who has "allied with the devil to cast the world into darkness". Turns out that was just a terrifying fairy tale. It’s no fairy tale. There are people in this world who raise armies of child soldiers and engage in ritual cannibalism and human sacrifice. There are people who build concentration camps and gulags and torture the people imprisoned inside. There are serial killers and child sex traffickers. These people exist. In a modern Western society, we prefer to either live in denial about this or try and develop more sophisticated explanations for this kind of behavior, but there are centuries of intellectual development that needed to happen for us to get here. Most people throughout most of history made sense of the world through myth. If it helps, think of the devil as more of a metaphor. Though honestly, I think I would make a stronger statement than that. For instance, you can attribute some of this behavior to mental illness, but the concept of mental illness is also a metaphor with almost as many inherent flaws. And even framing these behaviors as mental illness doesn’t work in cases where these behaviors are completely normal to the societies in which they take place. Everyone agrees that Ed Gein was mentally ill because he lived in a culture where murdering women, wearing their skin, and dancing around wasn’t normal, but there have been cultures where human sacrifices with uncanny similarities in ritual have been completely normal. Psychologists and anthropologists have all kinds of theories and explanations for this sort of thing, but it’s not like they have it all figured out. We’re nowhere close to hard science when it comes to explaining this stuff. Besides, what is science anyway? It’s a set of models to help people make predictions. It’s not fundamental truth. F=ma is a lie that we tell children because unless you’re approaching the speed of light, it’s close enough to get you the right answers. And the psychologists were getting high on cocaine and making up wild theories about men wanting to fuck their mothers around the same time the physicists finally figured out that F=ma isn’t exactly right. It sounds like you grew up in a weird cult and I’m sympathetic to that, but it’s a mistake to overgeneralize that experience as an example of religious faith in general. There are a lot of religious beliefs that use a mythical framing to encapsulate essential truths about the human experience. Not only did we need that encoding to get where we are today, but in some cases I’m not even sure we’ve come up with any better explanations.

JackMorgan 3y ago
Mythical framing as way to explain humanity's evils is one thing. Stories from Beowulf to Superman tell of characters who are evil because of their actions, sometimes even trying to explain their motivations. We use these stories to frame why sometimes people do heinous acts. However, I've talked to thousands of Americans who truly believe that roughly half of Americans are in communication with the devil and are part of conspiracy to usher in Satan's reign. This has become a blind spot where wickedness in believers is excused because "they're on our side". Everything is framed in a cosmic scale war between good and evil. When someone "satanic" does a good thing it is waved away as just a ruse to somehow advance the forces of evil. Did "one of us" do something wicked? Well, in war sometimes you have to do hard things to get the job done. See recent examples of "Christian" politicians and religious leaders who are caught performing sexual assault, theft, bribery, miscarriage of justice, pride, or theft. The churches I grew up in don't even comment on these acts. They've turned entirely from "individuals vs their own sin" to "believers vs a made up demonic army". I've had opportunity to since travel to hundreds of churches along the East Coast and seen the same thing over and over. Some American churches haven't fallen into this weird demonic conspiracy theory, but I'd wager right now it's the majority of them. You'll hear them talk all day about sin, but always in a frame of "us vs them". I agree though, that in a historical sense, maybe we needed that explanation that sometimes people are wicked, and it's better to not be wicked. I'm not entirely sure though that religion is the only way those stories get told. Nor that religion has even measurably changed how much wickedness happens per capita. But as a reply to the OP comment, I think my comments still stand. Believers definitely inhabit a totally different world.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  Are you a journalist?
  - JackMorgan 3y ago
    No, I was in seminary to be a preacher, and traveled a lot for that and other religious work. Also worked as the East Coast and TX recruiter for a religious school. Ended up not finishing and getting into software engineering.