Reply To: So Long and Thanks for all the Fish

[PopeBeanie]

I’ve taken things too personally and only in the past few years changed it to “it’s not always about me”. Even beyond that, “it’s not always about anyone in particular”. I’ve not assumed (for long, at least) that any behavior at TA or AZ is necessarily worse than people shooting wads because of an unexpected jolt of paranoia or a bad hair day. (I could google shooting wads, but was it first used in American Civil War stories, or maybe musket stories before that. Wait, I dunno, canons? Bows and arrows? Adam and Eve?)

Anyways, I’ve appreciated Dr. Bob’s comments even when they weren’t straightforward or when they incurred more speculation or perplexion than concise conclusions. Often after initial frustration, I tried to put my mind in his mind which was perhaps in the minds of current or potential fellows/followers of Catholicism, himself believing strongly in it or at least in its future. So I always tried to respond with a wider religious bunch of readers in mind, not just Dr. Bob.

He is/was still honest enough to admit that he “chose” Catholicism because that’s the local culture he grew up with. Above all other generalizations about religion, I maintain that culture and its peer pressure is what most drives human beings to believe in something, anything by default, and our social brains naturally default to what’s perceived as being the most socially acceptable, at a local level. We want to feel unique, but more than that we want to feel accepted and loved. The endeavor to define faith and meaning in some kind of “universal” context/mandate challenges libertarian intellects. Evolution has honed both our capacity for local, in-group empathies, and our broader, out-group prejudices.

Unification of local culture has been preternaturally enhanced by our inventions of myth, gods and God, angels, state deities, spirits in nature, the omnipotence of Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, and so on. Humans pressured to role play and unify in spirit helped build and defend civilizations, destroy them and rebuild them; only recently has in-group empathy vs out-group intolerance widened to a global stage of existentialism. Humanity needs to culturally evolve beyond its ignorance and intolerance of out-groups, and the only way I see this happening is if we can set a good example and positively influence outsiders. (IMO, that includes “we” atheists. Tolerate the tolerant, but not the intolerant. This feels like a 1960’s mantra, but look how tolerant we’ve become in 50 years, at least internally. Let’s see, I wonder if AdoptAGayMuslim.org is still available…)