[FRIAM] [dis]integrated

[David Eric Smith]

Yeah I don’t know.  

For some years I was working in ocean-floor engineering, and got a feel for seawater.  For all the devices you design, it is all-surrounding and omnipresent.  It relentlessly intrudes through any crack, seam, or pore, and it corrodes whatever it touches.  For whatever reason, this describes the affect of my response to people’s religiosity.  The more genuine and sincere they are, the stronger my aversion to that in them.  It’s not even the same as being averse to the whole person.  There are people of whom I think the world, and to whom I am very attached, in whom I just have to work around this one radioactive thing.  n.b., however, that all such people are related to me by birth.  There don’t seem to be any ones I have sought out as friends of whom that happens to be the case.  Maybe, borderline, one or two Jews, who seem to have a decorum and sense of proper privacy (those particular people, I mean) for themselves and for others.

There is another metaphor that also serves.  I have a friend with fairly bad arachnophobia.  I was commenting that I didn’t know what that would feel like, as spiders don’t particularly bother me, was for example ticks do.  She commented that it was funny, because her brother had said the same thing, using the same examples.  The reason, of course, is that most spiders prefer to mind their own business.  (Some Australian mouse spiders, perhaps less so.)  For ticks, their business is _you_.  Likewise, there is no box within which religiosity is content to stay.  It’s business is always _you_, so you can never turn your back on it in rest.

In trying to form a clear view, for my own purposes, of why I respond this way, in a quite different context earlier this week, I was thinking of trying to explain to someone that I grew up with religious people on me trying to force some kind of “religious conversion” and, in looking for a metaphor, the one that came to me was “like cops on a black man”.  And no matter how submissive I am and how much I would like to be cooperative, I so far have not found it in myself to want to go back into that.

It surprises me that these studies don’t seem to address questions of domination and constriction, and the degree to which being able to breathe matters to one or another person.

Eric



> On Oct 11, 2021, at 2:07 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> Doesn't work for me.   My parents are in a very liberal church and (I think) like it because it gives some structure and support in their community.   My dad's (I think formative) education at a strong liberal arts college probably contributed to my tendency to deconstruct things.   I'm not particularly annoyed with their semi-religious activities, but there were plenty of people in my high school that I found to be religious crazies who I almost felt obligated to abuse.  That hardened my atheism, but really it was hard right away in my early teenage years.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Monday, October 11, 2021 9:43 AM
> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: [FRIAM] [dis]integrated
> 
> Study: Atheists are Made By Their Parents https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fskepchick.org%2f2021%2f10%2fstudy-atheists-are-made-by-their-parents%2f&c=E,1,2G1IsnysW37qkXOrMoyLXGgacehySvzlBBD0wGXgUiHZFPFiq8oRkLu4J8VyPqz0vteY4F9ijy0I1jQMz57JJIg1WkOeQPeOqYDV9WgSFj4,&typo=1
> 
> Much of the argument is about credible displays of faith and hypocrisy. I thought this might be interesting following on the epically bent thread on [in]consistency, as well as some old conversations about how well one can describe/explain some historical decision/branch-point in their own life.
> 
> I land about where Rebecca does, I think.
> 
> --
> "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
> 
> 
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