’nuff said.
Besides the rather obvious arrogance that one claims the thoughts in their head are a communication with some god, or THE god of the Universe, religious thought is just as blatantly arrogant in a number of other ways.
Arrogance is defined by Merriam-Webster as: “an insulting way of thinking or behaving that comes from believing that you are better, smarter, or more important than other people.”
Take “more important” for starters:
“WE got it right, all other religions are dead nuts wrong, or at best incomplete.
WE are the chosen people, you’re not. Not chosen, inferior. WE are saved. You are damned.”
Can you get any more arrogant than that? And you want to teach children to think like this, really?
Religion thinks it has the goods, Ultimate Truth, how the world really works and the skinny on the afterlife and why? Because it says so in 2-3,000 year old books.
That’s it. No evidence, no study, no exploration, no experimentation, no hard work to discover knowledge like we have to do in any other endeavor…just read these old writings and all the truth is already there. Religion is smarter than all knowledge we have discovered since. It claims to already know better.
How fucking arrogant is that?
Arrogance squared is each religion does that and their claims are mutually exclusive, contradictory and absurd.
Arrogance cubed is: We teach it, all religions teach it to children as truth.
Scientific thinking on the other hand is self-correcting and humble. It cautiously puts forth what we know right now, subject to revision ( mostly addition and elaboration nowadays) but always willing to revise based on new data.
Religion says fuck the data, deny the data…“WE ALREADY KNOW”
Get Real, that’s as arrogant as it gets.
end religion now.
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For me the pinnacle of the arrogance is represented by the ever more frequently heard claim that deep down everyone actually *knows* there is a God. The inability to understand or accept that another person might actually think differently than them represents a serious lack of empathy. I sometimes wonder whether that sort of emotional dysfunction is cause or effect in the religious mind.
great point. At least in our culture it just seems right that there must be a god, like you said someone feels “i just know there is one” But how much of that is defacto cultural indoctrination. Buddhist kids dont get told there is a single creator god. Most of them are surrounded in their culture by a host of lesser dieties that are or arent necessarily Buddhist in origin, but these kids might take for granted that of course there is a little god you pray to for prosperity or health or whatever, but they wont be so smug at all about there must be a God. I think we are wired to seek agency, to look for intelligent active causes and it can be expressed thru cultural traditions as many animistic gods as in many tribal traditions (think Hinduism as an extreme example) or as in the stern supreme god of the Abrahamic religions which dominate the Middle East and the West.