Are theists arrogant?

I'd be inclined to say that, on a personal level, no theist is any more or less arrogant than a deist, pantheist, atheist, or other nontheistic individual. We are all human and we all have our own share of negative tendencies, destructive urges, and distasteful behavior.

That being said, I would also be inclined to say that certain theistic beliefs could ring a bit arrogant. There are some otherwise average individuals who believe that the entire billions of light years cosmos was created solely for humanity, in what could possibly be the most disproportionate allocation of resources imaginable. The proportions are so hilarious that there would be little difference in their ridiculousness if the human population was reduced by half, two thirds, or 99%.

The idea that only a certain group of individuals are the special people of a deity also seems to be a bit arrogant, as does non-universalism salvation theology.

But, at the end of the day, the most arrogant thing to me seems to be the idea that a single group of individuals has the truth of the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of all things.

Now, this does not make theists arrogant. It doesn't really even tip their overall arrogance quotient a bit, because it doesn't translate to real-world interaction except in some instances where those beliefs come into specific discussion, which isn't the majority of a person's life.

Anyway, thought I'd share my thoughts. Enjoy your respective holidays, hope all the Christians out there enjoyed their Christmas.

reply to post by madnessinmysoul


probably just as arrogant as atheists. you say theists are arrogant because they believe billions of years of things happen just for them... well... atheists are arrogant to believe they can know that billions of years have even existed, because many theists believe the earth to be only a few thousand years old.

nevermind

You managed to type a lot, but you never said anything that has not been explored..


What is the point of this thread???

Deism is the idea that some kind of intelligence ("God") created the universe, yet chooses not to interfere with it or its inhabitants. That means that there are no answered prayers, no miracles, no revelations, etc. Additionally, the deist generally believes that while God created the universe, things like the Big Bang, evolution, etc actually occurred, and God just got the ball rolling.
The theist on the other hand believes that God is an active participant in the world, answers prayers, talks to people, sends divinations, etc., and literally created the world in some way instead of just getting it started.

From yahoo answers I actually had to look up the difference.

No wonder I'm not religious, it's very confusing and a lot of work to figure out.

I don't think theists would be more arrogant than anyone else, there are many types of people who think they have all the answers.
No one could have any answers until they have a death experience or some type of personal spiritual experience.
Which is why it makes more sense to me to not have a religion, and to just keep an open mind, and roll with whatever comes my way.

Although, it's kind of interesting (and sometimes disturbing) to know how other people think.

Let the dogpile begin!

reply to post by againuntodust

Originally posted by againuntodust
reply to post by madnessinmysoul

 

probably just as arrogant as atheists.

Didn't I just say that? Oh...did you not read the OP?

Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
I'd be inclined to say that, on a personal level, no theist is any more or less arrogant than a deist, pantheist, atheist, or other nontheistic individual.

you say theists are arrogant because they believe billions of years of things happen just for them...

No, I said some theists are arrogant for holding that belief. Not all theists hold this belief.

well... atheists are arrogant to believe they can know that billions of years have even existed,

1: Atheists don't necessarily mean asuperstitionists, aspiritualists, asupernaturalists, etc. A good example of an atheist who accepts certain supernatural ideas on this very forum is the one and only Benevolent Heretic.
2: Those that are all of the above and accept the scientific claim that the universe is billions of years old aren't arrogant because it is not a belief as it is founded in evidence

because many theists believe the earth to be only a few thousand years old.

But that is a simple belief that can be readily falsified with science, which we all know works because we're arguing on the internet.

reply to post by mileysubet


I never claimed to have a single original idea in this post, I was just trying to put forth an idea that could lead to discussion. Hell, 99% of any discussion forum isn't going to consist of original ideas. I was just trying to spread general good will by stating that theists and all who aren't theists are more or less the same on the most meaningful levels, but certain beliefs held by some theists can be seen as arrogant.

reply to post by snowspirit


Yes, that's why I don't have any religion, that's why I'm an atheist. Not enough evidence.

No one could have any answers until they have a death experience or some type of personal spiritual experience.

Well...actually...you can simulate near death experiences in the lab, you can simulate personal spiritual experiences with drugs, and they aren't objective evidence...

Arguing with hostility against the members contributing to your thread isn't in the thread's best interest. I'm out, but thanks for the reply it did lend some insight.

reply to post by againuntodust


What hostility? People keep saying I'm hostile...then others say I'm really polite...what is up with that? Can you please show me where I'm being hostile? I'd honestly prefer that because it can help me to tone down my future posts and be less hostile in the future.

And why aren't you addressing the points I made? Was it the dogpile comment? That was a one-liner joke to lighten the tone...I suck at telling jokes on the internet, but I assure you I'm much better in person with off-hand jokes.

Originally posted by mileysubet
You managed to type a lot, but you never said anything that has not been explored..

edit on 25-12-2010 by mileysubet because: replaced the word "known" with: "that has not been explored:

What is the point of this thread???

edit on 25-12-2010 by mileysubet because: (no reason given)

From what I have seen, he just can't help himself! He has to keep slamming the God he says he knows doesn't exist - and he does it by denigrating believers.
IMO, atheists are both arrogant and deeply fearful/sad people. Starting flame wars is a way of keeping the fear at bay..
Vicky

I'd say that anyone who does NOT believe that the human being stands relative to everything at the apex of a very long if not eternal cosmic evolutionary process, is either in denial of the evidence of the life they live (or were intended to live), or are crazy, or simply misusing the frame of reference I've proposed, that of a monistic idealism (consciousness of primary), as opposed to a purely materialist monism (matter alone is primary with consciousness arises only as an epiphenomenon of matter), wherein the human being is made in the image of the creator, and is fast catching up his true nature, as being at one with God as the spirit of the universe - spirit of life.

This does not imply a purely solipsistic POV, excpet to the degree that we have no other choice in the matter, as consciously aware beings in creation embued with free will participating as co-creators in manifest reality.

That doesn't make me arrogant either, to think that way, just committed to truth and reality as it really is!

I suspect that the atheists ah snarkiness, is because at bottom, he knows he's either completely ignorant, in the face of the uknowable, which would make him an agnostic, not an atheist, or, that he just might have to resort to arguing for his own unconsciousness or non existence.

reply to post by NewAgeMan

Just kidding!


P.S. Arrogance, is rude and offensive, but Grace OTOH is charming, and Civilized, there's a difference.


But spiritually, indeed - everything was made by the father (first/last cause) for the son, that's true, which equates life itself, with love as the first/last cause. Not an easy thing to understand but not incomprehensible either, not in light of the evidence anyway..

And as for other sentients in the cosmos... who knows?

For a telephatic "hive mind" being, what we perhaps think of or better yet, experience, as "God", could be entirely different, with the exception that they will surely have discovered the highest frame of reason to include the Absolute in their own philosophy, metaphysics or spirituality/psychology.

"Our father who art in heaven, hallowed (sacred) be Thy Name " (I'm sure that "God" goes by many names..)

I suspect that the ONLY "people", in the entire universe, who do NOT believe in God, or have any sort of relationship with their creator, are atheists on earth.

Now that's perhaps getting a little arrogant, but the premise of the OP needed addressing, so what can ya do?

reply to post by madnessinmysoul


Before I say anything, I will say that I am an atheist. I sometimes even seem to show hints of arrogance (I sometimes mock peoples beliefs in my mind) but I still do enjoy having the actual rare, productive "debate" on this forum.


Having said that, it just seems to me that your threads lately are just rods for fishing creationists to "rage" on it for the "lulz". I enjoy what you sometimes write on this forum, some of them have been very intriguing, but your posts are becoming as I stated before; merely provocative with no productive intent. Just chill.

I'm sorry but how are atheists arrogant?

They go off facts and their beliefs are far more believable than a talking zombie and/or a all seeing lord of everything living in the clouds.

If you can say atheists are arrogant then you can also say that Christians and all other religions that believe in a 'god' are totally psychopathic and delusional.

Please don't judge and label an entire belief system as that can be construed as discrimination.

Vicky32, if I believed in what you believed in (whatever that is), then would I be arrogant? Probably not.

People in this world are constantly having a debate over which religion is right, and all of them say that if you don't believe what I believe then you are wrong. They will debate that fact by picking faults.

That is in no part due to the OP, but the comments that followed.

Flame jacket on

Im kinda missing the point?


All are equal but not all are alowed their own personal beliefs?

Has someone been getting under your skin, Madness?
- Mine too.

You could never really stoop to his level, but by lumping all theists into one group in an inflammatory title, you seem to be trying.

I spent years married to an atheist. Our respective beliefs or lack of did not affect our marriage, but him continually telling me was arrogant did get tedious. His logic was that even though I said practically nothing about my beliefs, (out of deference to him,) the fact that I believed in a god and he didn't meant that I believed I knew more than he did. He was determined to keep rubbing this in until I saw the error of my ways.

I have had experiences which I believe would prove to any open-minded person who experienced them that god exists and that things which some people call supernatural can take place.

Husband did not believe I'd had these experiences and called them lies. He said they had to be lies, because he knew such things could not happen.

And pretty well any atheist reading this, is going to believe that, by saying I have had these experiences, I have proved I am either deluded or a liar. It's the same logic; a supposed knowledge that such things can't happen.


Many years ago I had a friend at school, Liz, who saw things differently out of each eye. She believed she was colour-blind in one eye until we did colour-blindness tests in science which showed she had perfect colour vision.

Our group of friends discussed this for hours with her, comparing what we saw, carefully describing things as best we could, and ended up concluding that our sight was the same as the sight in her "bad" eye.
Liz was a shy, modest and sincere girl, and had trouble believing she was different in a good way, although she'd had no trouble believing previously she had a bad eye.
We were pretty excited, believing she was special and we had discovered something extra to what we had been taught, and dragged her up to our science teacher about it. He thought we were just being silly and she was making it up to get attention.
So we tried the art teacher who told us vision was something "magical" and could be different for each person.

Not so long back it was discovered that, although most humans have 3 types of cones for colour vision, a few had a fourth type, making them able to see things the rest of us can't.


I'm not saying people who have had experiences like mine are special. I'm just saying a belief that something is impossible can, despite being very hard to disprove, be quite wrong.

I wouldn't say the science teacher was arrogant in saying he knew this special vision Liz described was impossible. He was saying what seemed to him to be inarguable truth. Scientists had carefully studied human vision and "knew" all about it.

However he was dead wrong when he accused Liz of arrogantly making up a lie just to make herself look "special".

reply to post by madnessinmysoul


I think that a persons experiences with different people and there personality's is going to have a bearing on peoples feelings on this matter . Certainly the whole the earth is six thousand years old crowd is colossally ignorant but arrogant ?

Cheers xpert11.

reply to post by Vicky32


Yay, lying!

I'm sorry, but childish comments like that are how I deal with the stark reality of blatant lies.

Originally posted by Vicky32
[From what I have seen, he just can't help himself! He has to keep slamming the God he says he knows doesn't exist - and he does it by denigrating believers.

Um..when did I ever claim to know that any deity doesn't exist? I don't even know if a deity that I just made up off the top of my head, like the omnipotent burrito, doesn't exist.

I've repeatedly claimed that I am an agnostic atheist, one who doesn't know therefore doesn't believe.

If you can show me one place where I've claimed to know that any deity doesn't exist I will video myself eating a baseball cap. I'm serious. I might cook it up though.

As for denigrating believers...didn't I start off this thread by saying that no group is anymore arrogant than any other? Did you not read the OP? I'm not quoting it again, because I've already had to quote the OP to show that I don't think theists are arrogant, though I would say that certain theistic beliefs not shared by all theists could be seen as arrogant.

On the whole I consider theists to be no more and no less lovely than atheists. Hell, most of my friends are theists. Most of my coworkers, fellow students, family members, and people I look up to are....theists. I respect these people immensely and those that I do not respect have done things that have nothing to do with their theism to lose my respect.

I am not denigrating believers, I'm just chiming in that maybe a few specific theological beliefs might be considered a bit arrogant while responding to a thread that makes incessant and bigoted comments about atheists.

IMO, atheists are both arrogant and deeply fearful/sad people.

Well, that's a stupid petty comment, and there's an entire thread devoted to such comments, which is actually why I started this thread.

Starting flame wars is a way of keeping the fear at bay..
Vicky

Nope, I'm not starting a flame war. I just want to see how theists reconcile beliefs that are seemingly egocentric with reality.


reply to post by NewAgeMan

Originally posted by NewAgeMan
That doesn't make me arrogant either, to think that way, just committed to truth and reality as it really is!

But monistic idealism isn't a view you can base facts in. Materialism at least allows you to reach objective factual conclusions. All the evidence points to consciousness being found as a result of matter, not as a phenomenon on its own. It can be altered and fooled by matter. It is only found as a consequence of matter, never on its own.

I suspect that the atheists ah snarkiness, is because at bottom, he knows he's either completely ignorant, in the face of the uknowable, which would make him an agnostic, not an atheist, or, that he just might have to resort to arguing for his own unconsciousness or non existence.

I'm sorry, but no.
There isn't much snarkiness except as a defense mechanism to stave off breakdowns in sanity as caused by repeatedly facing bigotry, ignorance, etc.

In fact, you bring up a reason for me to be snarky, but I'll refrain from doing so.

Agnostic = I don't know
Atheist = I don't believe

The two statements aren't mutually exclusive. I am, in fact, an agnostic atheist (as I've claimed a ridiculous number of times on ATS). I am not certain, but I do not accept the claim on faith. Therefore I do not believe and am an atheist.

If I were given a good reason to believe I may become a theist, but I've yet to be provided with something to change my mind.

reply to post by Somehumanbeing


Actually, this thread was sort of meant as a chill thread. I didn't mean to provoke, hence the opening statement. I didn't do a very good job at that.

I still maintain that no group is any more or less arrogant than any other...except for arrogant people, obviously that group is more arrogant than non-arrogant people.



reply to post by theRhenn


All are allowed their beliefs, but I'm just saying that a few might come off as a bit...arrogant. Of course, these beliefs don't really contribute to the overall arrogance of an individual, because most individuals don't base the majority of interactions in their daily lives on these ideas.

Most Jewish people who claim to be the chosen people of G-d....don't act like that when they're dealing with other people. I've known quite a few, but they don't treat men any different because I'm not Jewish. The belief might be arrogant, but it doesn't contribute to the overall arrogance of a person because a person is far more than their religious beliefs.


reply to post by Kailassa


Well, the title is inflammatory simply to get people to read the first paragraph. Are they arrogant? The answer is "not really".

Hell, most of them are downright decent individuals.

Mankind probably contains 6½ billion slightly different tunnel-realities, each one with a small solipsistic twist. In a few percent the mind-set commonly known as sociopathy is dominant. Such individuals MUST in life (and often in death) have a tunnel-reality monopoly; no matter at what cost.

The 'primitives' amongst the monopol-hungry use tactics from machinelike repetitive clichées, interference in social life, brainwashing and eventually violence. Naturally non-sociopathic mindsets will gang together in various social models such as democracy, secular egalitarian society, liberalism etc, resisting the basically fascistic attitudes of monopolists.

And the monopolists will start whining about their fascistic (fascistic as seen from the non-monopolist perspective) rights being taken away.

This functioned until some centuries ago, when the value of observation, logic, rational reasoning, science and pragmatism was acknowledged, and cosensus enforced these added dimensions to the tunnel-realities ruling earlier.

So now we also have an 'academic' superstructure on top of the invasive tactics of monopolists, and a lot of the debate between sociopathic monopolists and non-sociopaths is about 'evidence'. And then evidence about evidence; and evidence about evidence about evidence.

And no matter what, a basis for a common tunnel-reality is reached sooner or later. Gravity practically never fails, mathematics describes the dualistic universe well, causality is visible in cosmos, the universe is NOT geocentric (except for lost cases of super-solipsists), and an increasingly open and INCLUSIVE model is painstakingly build from basic axioms.

The monopolists usually operates from EXCLUSIVE tunnel-realities, where the answers are prefabricated, and where competing methods or observations conveniently can be disregarded (what I call a self-containing and closed 'bubble').

It's easy to predict the outsome of a conflict between the inclusive and exclusive types of tunnel-realities in a world of a moderately greedy and mentally lazy mankind. People want food on the table, safety and possibly some electronic and often rather useless gadgets, more than imaginary fables about the invisible part of existence.

This brings us to the contemporary situation. Monopolistic fabulations are loosing ground, and as an answer to this challenge new fabulations have been constructed. Counterfeit logic, pseudo-science and even a rather irrational attempt of epistemology are emerging, pretending to be 'the real thing' (a list of manifestations of this is too extensive for one post), and seems to be a kind of desperate last stand. And with mankind's growing knowledge of the ORIGINAL and authentic option of defined science, the counterfeit version will backfire and expose the monopolists as con-tricksters, digging their own graves with the pseudo-academic fakes they send out.

This is where the arrogance and self-delusion of all our small Hitlers, Stalins and whoever is situated. Not in having the details of what 'god' thinks is a reasonable period to keep your neighbour's lawnmower, which you borrowed two years ago.