Warning, disclaimer, and introduction: If you're easily offended when someone questions your beliefs, this is not the thread for you.
An idea occurred to me today, and I'm starting a new thread for it because talking about religion in the Please Pray for Our Miners thread irritates people and gets me in trouble.
In that thread, I felt there was an atmosphere in which people who disagreed with the idea that prayer works were unwelcome, as if discussion of the tragic events at the mine were inextricably tied to a particular religious opinion. Here are some of my opinions: I don't believe prayer works in the sense of making something happen outside oneself or even raising the likelihood that something will happen. I don't believe one can send good thoughts to another; one can think good thoughts, but they won't be delivered. I believe that people who claim certainty about God's values, attitudes, priorities, and behavior are overconfident.
I've observed that a social norm makes it acceptable to say "Prayers are answered" in public and makes it unacceptable to say "Prayers aren't answered." I find this unequal treatment unfair.
This is the hypothesis I'm wondering about: Maybe the degree to which you expect others to share your beliefs depends on where you grew up. I was raised in an ethnically and religiously diverse town. I now live in a city that's also diverse. In my home town, it was understood that you didn't know a person's religious affiliation until the person revealed it. A stranger might be Roman Catholic, Methodist, Mennonite, Jewish, Nazarene, Presbyterian, Armenian Apostolic, Baptist, Greek Orthodox, Church of Christ, A.M.E. Zion, Episcopal, Church of God, Seventh-day Adventist (and I'm sure I'm leaving out some), or unaffiliated. You couldn't assert your own particular beliefs in a group and assume that others would accept them as you did. It simply wasn't done. It was bad manners.
On the Web, however, some people state their beliefs as if explaining an objective, noncontroversial principle of mathematics, even though the audience is similarly mixed. I can only speculate that people who do this must live in a community where asserting religious beliefs as truths is accepted because everyone goes to the same church. Perhaps there are a few dissenters, but they've learned to keep quiet.
Am I right or wrong? Not about whether prayer works, but about whether people who assert their beliefs publicly, without fear of contradiction, come from religiously homogeneous communities.
An idea occurred to me today, and I'm starting a new thread for it because talking about religion in the Please Pray for Our Miners thread irritates people and gets me in trouble.
In that thread, I felt there was an atmosphere in which people who disagreed with the idea that prayer works were unwelcome, as if discussion of the tragic events at the mine were inextricably tied to a particular religious opinion. Here are some of my opinions: I don't believe prayer works in the sense of making something happen outside oneself or even raising the likelihood that something will happen. I don't believe one can send good thoughts to another; one can think good thoughts, but they won't be delivered. I believe that people who claim certainty about God's values, attitudes, priorities, and behavior are overconfident.
I've observed that a social norm makes it acceptable to say "Prayers are answered" in public and makes it unacceptable to say "Prayers aren't answered." I find this unequal treatment unfair.
This is the hypothesis I'm wondering about: Maybe the degree to which you expect others to share your beliefs depends on where you grew up. I was raised in an ethnically and religiously diverse town. I now live in a city that's also diverse. In my home town, it was understood that you didn't know a person's religious affiliation until the person revealed it. A stranger might be Roman Catholic, Methodist, Mennonite, Jewish, Nazarene, Presbyterian, Armenian Apostolic, Baptist, Greek Orthodox, Church of Christ, A.M.E. Zion, Episcopal, Church of God, Seventh-day Adventist (and I'm sure I'm leaving out some), or unaffiliated. You couldn't assert your own particular beliefs in a group and assume that others would accept them as you did. It simply wasn't done. It was bad manners.
On the Web, however, some people state their beliefs as if explaining an objective, noncontroversial principle of mathematics, even though the audience is similarly mixed. I can only speculate that people who do this must live in a community where asserting religious beliefs as truths is accepted because everyone goes to the same church. Perhaps there are a few dissenters, but they've learned to keep quiet.
Am I right or wrong? Not about whether prayer works, but about whether people who assert their beliefs publicly, without fear of contradiction, come from religiously homogeneous communities.
