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Indeed. To take an easy case, I have to constantly admonish secular people have to such empathy and magnanimity towards religious people. Many secular people consider religious folk mentally diseased and morally defective. This is not meant to be insulting. I just take ethics seriously. It would be easy for me decide that all religious people are intellectually and morally deranged; a lost cause. They routinely claim certainty about something I know they are not certain. Almost always they were indoctrinated about what to believe, and then not to question it. Case closed, right?
But that's not the whole story. I know that religion does so much good for so many people. I know what spiritual yearning and salvation feels like. Order. Comfort. Community. Humility that this world is much bigger than we can even begin to understand. To realize that the purpose life - no matter who is controlling it - is to love whoever is around to be loved. To realize that one friend is all one needs in order to be well supplied with friendship. Imaginary friends should count, too.
So yeah, I think being religious means something is mentally wrong with you. But don't let what I have written tell on me. I - the author of this post - actually, sincerely, earnestly, unsarcastically and unironically, have empathy for religious people.
But this isn't about religion.
This is about empathy. Not pity. Not sympathy. And certainly not about condoning actions one finds immoral. Empathy isn't best derived from an analogous personal experience. Thoughts can overcome emotion. As a straight guy, I too find depictions of men blowing and butt fucking one another to be inherently gross. According to John Haidt, this is fairly normal as when some straight men are show such images, areas in brain related to disgust become active. However, I have the analogous feelings of love and lust to fall back on. When a gay person says "I want that too" my emotions are easily overcome. When it comes to trans related issues I'm more at a loss. I have hated myself in one way or another, but never in a way that altering my outward appearance would be useful. I'm quite open to experience, so when a trans person tells me they want to be trans on their own time, I have to felt sense or moral or ethical implication, and am willing to make reasonable accommodations in kind. However, when trans activists make a religion out of woke, I can delineate what and is or is not a reasonable accommodation in kind. Importantly, I can still have empathy for the terminally woke. It probably is genuinely distressing to think the Cass Report is bigoted pseudoscience, or that there is some sort of trans genocide, as is often hysterically claimed. Empathy has a role to play in destroying bad ideas.
For what it's worth, from the perspective of someone who's very religious, the worst and most frustrating attitude I've ever run into from non-religious people is the idea that because religion is "a choice" it must always come second to other identities. A gay person (supposedly) can't choose not to be gay, but a Christian can choose not to be Christian, or can choose not to be an anti-gay Christian, so gay identity comes first.
But that's not how any serious follower of any religion I've ever spoken to experiences their religion, and it's certainly not how I experience it. I'm not just choosing this or that on the basis of arbitrary preference, such that I could change my mind. Faith is not like picking which car to drive. I'm practicing a particular religion because it's actually true. Telling me "well, you could just choose not to be Christian" feels like, ironically, someone telling a scientist, "well, you could just choose not to be Darwinist, look, Lysenkoism is a perfectly good choice, why not believe that?"
The atheist who thinks that I'm wrong and my beliefs are false is, to my mind at least, better and more tolerable than the atheist who thinks that my beliefs are mere affectation or aesthetic preference. No, I can't just believe something else, because that would be switching from something true to something false. If you want me to change my beliefs, you have to actually convince me that my beliefs are false. There is no shortcut.
This is fascinating. I would have remained blind to it otherwise, so thanks. I wonder how many other religious people feel this way. I have learned to put conscious effort into empathizing with people taking their religion as literally true. It explains so much, and has changed me for the better. However, I never considered that religious beliefs themselves would be, seem, feel, etc. like they were not a conscious choice.
For example, I prefer exclusively women over men when it comes to having sex. No argument exists which could convince me to sexually prefer men (any more than there is a convincing argument that I prefer eating poo over ice-cream). I'm just not wired to prefer those things. However, I could be convinced to become a Christian or Muslim or Flat Earther or 9/11 truther, or whatever. My non-theism remains a choice. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something or this is all semantics, hinging on free will or something.
Are deeply held religious beliefs experienced the same way as be deeply held beliefs like murdering random people is wrong, or the Sun is driven by fusion, or the govt shouldn't tax unrealized gains, or the US is a great country, etc. How are religious beliefs experienced differently?
A chaplain I knew once credited it as to experience the sublime in a way that changes your perspective afterwards on the world.
'Sublime' is a word that's often used as just another synonym for quality in art, but it can mean more than just 'pretty.' Something sublime is something that strikes one with awe- not simply being impressed, but the much more intense feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder. Once you experience it, you are forever changed, because while your feeling on the thing may change afterwards, the reverence / respect / fear / wonder changes how you see the relation of things.
This is not, to be clear, a 'solely' religious experience. It's a somewhat common attestation of astronauts who go into space and look down on the earth- seeing how small their home countries are puts the their formerly massive worlds into a new perspective. Astronauts, despite coming from often committed career professional paths of government cultures, often have a reputation for being more post-nationalist/more internationalist, not because they don't care about their countries but because their paradigm is shifted by the scale perception and how they view their homelands. That sense of being taken out of your previous perception paradigm and thrust into another has other analogs as well, often when dealing with items of scale- some people get put into awe by nature, or by mega-engineering, or by diving deep into conceptually massive items.
The point here isn't 'what' causes your perception shift, but rather that you have one, and what that means going forward. Just as an astronaut is never going to look at earth the same way again even when they return, or an environmentalist struck by the grandeur of nature will never be as impressed by industrial output, the very way people connect the world together has changed in a way that is not 'merely' a choice.
You do not choose to undergo the sublime experience (you can go look at something other people say is sublime and feel nothing), but likewise when you do experience the sublime you do not 'choose' to let it change you- instead, you are the one changed, because that is part of what strikes the reverence / respect / fear. And after that sort of experience, well... you can try to argue with a converted environmentalist that industrialization is good, and they might be swayed by specific arguments that industrialization may be a net positive for society despite it's harm to nature, but the underlying paradigms of how they put the world together has changed. You can't really argue people out of that any more than you can argue them out of their own visual perception.
Religion is a broad set of dynamics and relations, but the sublime religious experience is broad enough / shared enough that people who have experienced it can find enough of each other to validate and further the beliefs, in a similar sense that you and I both know what 'love' is as an experience despite not knowing eachother or eachother's experiences. For those touched by the sublime, something similar exists, and through it the sense of solidarity that the sublime experience, rather than being purely personal, is a shared sense of something else- and that something else is God, with all the fear / wonder / awe / reverence that implies.
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