The foundational principle of Christianity (in America at least, in my experience) is believe something with no evidence it is true. They call it "faith". I was raised in small town Oregon and Texas going to Christian private schools and church for years, and that "faith" thing is absolutely their central belief. I remember clearly once when I was 9 finding the whole thing deeply illogical. Later in life I got a PhD in math, partly motivated by wanting to better heal my brain from how I was raised.
I'm not at all surprised Christians fall for Trump's lies and Qanon.
Every religion is based on faith, in the exact way you portrayed it. Faith by definition regards things that cannot be proven. If they could be proven, it would be knowledge, not faith.
Exactly, but I wonder how does affect the mind of a child, being raised for years into believing something that cannot be proved and getting reprimanded (often punished in the past) for questioning it.
Would an atheist be a better leader? In my opinion yes, but cannot prove it.
What I'm sure about is that being educated into not questioning beliefs imposed from above makes people more easy to herd by bad leaders.
I wish someone could do some independent unbiased research in this field, then make sure the results remain independent and unbiased even after publication.
I was in my early twenties before I stopped believing in things that, in hindsight, seem utterly unbelievable to me.
What I've struggled with for a long time is the realization that the person I was, believing all of that, wasn't some brainwashed religious nutjob. I was just as 'rational' then as I am now.
Even worse, if I'm fully honest with myself the paradigm shift wasn't primarily a result of my own rational thinking, but significantly affected by social issues that made it hard for me to keep sweeping various realizations under the rug. If not for the non-rational issues, I might've still been convinced born-again evangelical christian.
I don't think that, day to day, an atheist is a better leader than, say, a born-again evangelical christian. In my experience the quality of a leader is largely unrelated to the 'paradigm' they buy into. There are so many aspects to being a 'good' leader that are entirely unrelated to the version of reality one ascribes to.
Where I /do/ think there's a really issue, is that by and large born-again evangelical christians are less 'anarchic' than atheists in their approach to leadership, and that they tend to operate in environments that are more homogenous. So it's possible that a terrible evangelical leader gets away with it because they keep moving within a very homogenous environment.
but I'd argue that this problem is possibly just as much the case with particular SV-style leaders. Or C-level people in a broader sense. I more than once felt that the processes that led to certain people occupying high-level positions in the companies I worked it were not that different from what I experienced back when I was 'in the fold'.
Perhaps it's not the same, but I'd definitely argue that it's a blind spot for 'atheists'. The idea that somehow they are not as susceptible to the dynamics of, among others, the Evanglicals.
True. But Evangelicals have a unique position at this moment in their ideological history, where their leardship is aggressively backing someone who defies their core tenants. Such a crisis of faith happens in all religions from time to time, but in this moment for this group, it is now. As such, "find a new sect they doesn't require me to reconsile such things" is at peak likelihood for many of that faith.
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The foundational principle of Christianity (in America at least, in my experience) is believe something with no evidence it is true. They call it "faith". I was raised in small town Oregon and Texas going to Christian private schools and church for years, and that "faith" thing is absolutely their central belief. I remember clearly once when I was 9 finding the whole thing deeply illogical. Later in life I got a PhD in math, partly motivated by wanting to better heal my brain from how I was raised.
I'm not at all surprised Christians fall for Trump's lies and Qanon.
Every religion is based on faith, in the exact way you portrayed it. Faith by definition regards things that cannot be proven. If they could be proven, it would be knowledge, not faith.
Exactly, but I wonder how does affect the mind of a child, being raised for years into believing something that cannot be proved and getting reprimanded (often punished in the past) for questioning it.
Would an atheist be a better leader? In my opinion yes, but cannot prove it. What I'm sure about is that being educated into not questioning beliefs imposed from above makes people more easy to herd by bad leaders. I wish someone could do some independent unbiased research in this field, then make sure the results remain independent and unbiased even after publication.
I was in my early twenties before I stopped believing in things that, in hindsight, seem utterly unbelievable to me.
What I've struggled with for a long time is the realization that the person I was, believing all of that, wasn't some brainwashed religious nutjob. I was just as 'rational' then as I am now.
Even worse, if I'm fully honest with myself the paradigm shift wasn't primarily a result of my own rational thinking, but significantly affected by social issues that made it hard for me to keep sweeping various realizations under the rug. If not for the non-rational issues, I might've still been convinced born-again evangelical christian.
I don't think that, day to day, an atheist is a better leader than, say, a born-again evangelical christian. In my experience the quality of a leader is largely unrelated to the 'paradigm' they buy into. There are so many aspects to being a 'good' leader that are entirely unrelated to the version of reality one ascribes to.
Where I /do/ think there's a really issue, is that by and large born-again evangelical christians are less 'anarchic' than atheists in their approach to leadership, and that they tend to operate in environments that are more homogenous. So it's possible that a terrible evangelical leader gets away with it because they keep moving within a very homogenous environment.
but I'd argue that this problem is possibly just as much the case with particular SV-style leaders. Or C-level people in a broader sense. I more than once felt that the processes that led to certain people occupying high-level positions in the companies I worked it were not that different from what I experienced back when I was 'in the fold'.
Perhaps it's not the same, but I'd definitely argue that it's a blind spot for 'atheists'. The idea that somehow they are not as susceptible to the dynamics of, among others, the Evanglicals.
True. But Evangelicals have a unique position at this moment in their ideological history, where their leardship is aggressively backing someone who defies their core tenants. Such a crisis of faith happens in all religions from time to time, but in this moment for this group, it is now. As such, "find a new sect they doesn't require me to reconsile such things" is at peak likelihood for many of that faith.
And the less evidence you need to believe the thing, the more faith points you get.
I'm not at all surprised your comment has been downvoted to oblivion.
Such arrogance. Faith (of any kind) increases humanity.
How do you know?