Walker wrote:
It just doesn’t seem right to define another’s mind based on what one knows of oneself.
Very true.
Hard to resist, sometimes, though. We tend to assume that people have the same motives we do, or that the people we already know must have the same motives as new people we meet. But it is not always so, and you are right to caution us against such assumptions.
Seems to be some obsession with labeling people to fit within some hierarchy of delusional affliction, a condition from which atheists are not immune.
No indeed. As a Theist, when I come into a forum like this, I immediately find myself labeled as an unthinking conformist to some dogma imposed on me by my upbringing, by authoritarian clergy or by a simple lack of personal reflection, perhaps -- all conjectural and judgmental, but not accurate. Of course, none of the labelers know me from a son of Adam...but they have already the strongest views about my possible motives for belief in God, and they advance them without a hint of self-awareness, all the while enjoining me to have more self-awareness.
Not that I mind. I quite expect it, in fact, and chose my pseudonym very deliberately, in order to put the red flag before the metaphorical bulls.
So the presumption is nothing but what I expected -- nothing I did not, in fact, invite by declaring myself a Theist so openly in a place wherein many Atheists roam.
For instance, an appeal to authority is a movement to create a world of authority..., an appeal to reason is a movement to create that world of reason. Same goes for appeals to humor, to lightness, to intelligence. These are movements from stillness to create those worlds.
That's an interesting way to put it. I'll have to keep thinking about that. But there is definitely a link between what one appeals to by way of argument and how one perceives the world to be constructed. You seem to say more, however; that there is also a link between how one appeals and how one hopes or imagines oneself able to
reconstruct the world.
I detect this especially in the Social Justice crowd. They seem to believe that if they scream "injustice," "marginalization," "oppressor," "tyranny" and "rebel" enough, that the world will reorganize itself to conform to their screeches. And as it becomes apparent that their please are going unheard, and reality is not responding by conforming to their wishes, their voices become even more shrill and their actions more violent.
Witness the riots at Berkeley. What were they but the petulant efforts of Social Justice Warriors to make the world come around to their view, by behaving in the most absurdly violent, stupid, and unjust ways they could manage? The black-shirts have become the new "brown-shirts," but cannot see themselves as such, because they're so sure they're "right" about everything that they can't imagine they could be acting like little Nazis, even though the parallels are staggeringly obvious to any impartial observer.
They really seem to think they will bend reality itself by the sheer force of their appeals. And their appeals to shut down free speech tell you everything you need to know about the world they foresee as ideal.
Interesting.
(Sorry: just have to have a laugh at the level of bluster here.)
Why should I be offended? I'm not. Nor should you be.