willhud9 wrote:1) Don't preach to me. I was just as religious as you were and an associate pastor for a Southern Baptist Church AND went to Liberty University for a year to go for a pastoral studies degree before changing schools and majors. So yes I do know what it is like, very intimately.
I was not preaching to you. I was expressing the difference. I am not here to talk about our religiosity. I didn't even deny that you do know what it is like.
Not that it matters much, but I am unsure how you can reliably state that you're just as religious as me if you don't even know me or much about me, but I suppose that is another issue, for another time.
2) My religious beliefs and practices WERE irrational and rightfully should be ridiculed.
Even if this were true, it is irrelevant to the point. The point in question is whether religious belief and such can be part of a person's identity. I provided sources and a theory (social identity theory) within psychology that says it is. Nothing about this suggests that the components of the identity have to be "rational".
Thus far no one has even challenged the sources and theory I pointed toward. Hackenslash responded to my post, but he just omitted the relevant parts, leaving them unaddressed. But that's not a rebuttal; it is simply ignoring the issue at hand. You, on the other hand, at least try to address the issue, but continuously confuse what's at discussion.
It may go to follow that when we say praying is fucking wankers than it can technically follow that those who pray are fucking wankers, but it does not.
I can't make good sense of this sentence. From what I can tell, you seem to be saying that a person can claim that praying is silly without anything "following" about the person. I am not too sure what you mean by "follow", though often times that is the language of entailment. Yet, not all messages are entailed by their literal meaning, if there's one thing that English pragmatics teaches us, it's that. But the point here needn't be that to say that a practice or belief of the religious sort is silly is to say the person is silly. It is just that these practices and beliefs are so intertwined with his identity, that there is a perceived degradation of the person himself.
Once you grant social identity theory, as I mentioned, this distinction between personal identity and belief, at least of the religious sort, is not always so clear. Nothing about this suggests that we should not criticize religious beliefs anyways, but it does, at least if we accept this theory, give us pause about the intelligibility of the distinction.
3) What Shrunk said and which you avoided.
What did I avoid?