The average religion is a huge tangled mess of opinions, beliefs, customs, traditions, and practices. If you think it is adequately summed up as being "an opinion" then you know less than nothing about religion. Which, since you are an atheist, is fine. Nobody says you need to understand religion. Just be careful not to underestimate by too much how much you don't know about it.
While I’ll concede that I barely understand how people can actually be believers, I wouldn’t say that I’m uneducated on the topic.
To be fair — especially after reading the comments — I realize saying the entirety of religion can be called an opinion isn’t that great. In hindsight I should have changed it to a massive set of opinion, maybe
The idea that opinion and the most solid faith of religious certainty are the same kind of thing is not necessarily unreasonable, although it's unusually blunt as systems for classifying different kinds of belief go.
But not all religion is about faith, or about believing the right things. The one I'm guessing you're probably most familiar with puts an unusual degree of emphasis on it, but even so there is a lot more to it.
Come to think of it, treating all beliefs within a religion — all the most obscure statements of its holy books and the most maniacal speeches of its ordained preachers — as if they're equivalent to the central principles of the faith, is also the sort of thing the craziest of the religious zealots do. There are always plenty of opinions in a religion for which it can be useful for adherents and atheists alike to recognize a difference in their character compared to that of the core tenets.
Agreed. I would still stick with my original point but I’d rephrase it. Religion is a huge set of opinions that a person built their view of the world off of. These opinions, just like anything else, should be allowed to be critized. Everything should be.
I don’t think opinions and beliefs are the same thing, beliefs just have a strong influence on our opinions. Beliefs are how you think the world works, opinions are which decisions you think are right or wrong.
But this doesn’t mean that beliefs should be exempt from criticism.
This does make sense but my brain isn’t satisfied. If you think the world works as suggested by science, that’s your opinion, isn’t it?
According to Cambridge, an opinion is a belief. Now, saying a belief is an opinion based on this would be a logical fallacy, right? So, are beliefs opinions?
The fallacy you’ve got there is called “equivocation” and it’s on you.
Belief, faith, opinion, all words have multiple meanings and context-dependent implications. My belief that the Phillies will have a good year might be based on their off-season moves, or it could just be an ardent hope. It’s not at all the same as the belief that a suicide bomber has that his sacrifice will earn him eternal reward and strike a significant blow against the great Satan.
Belief can be an opinion, implying that it is based on experience and potentially flexible. Belief can be faith, implying it is based on hope and is inflexible. It is not a contradiction for both to exist at the same time, and it’s disingenuous to dismiss a person’s faith as an opinion by the transitive property of the word “belief.” That’s not how language works.
I know that the fallacy would be on me. Who else would it be on? Besides, I specifically didn’t conclude that belief is an opinion based on an opinion being a belief according to the definiton.
It surely can seem to be dismissive when I tell someone that their belief isn’t as valuable as they think it is. The sad reality is, beliefs are practically immune to criticism and scrutiny since it is universally frowned upon to criticize someone’s beliefs. I think that’s stupid. Why would religious beliefs deserve this kind of immunity when there is a whole bunch to rightfully critizice? I want to find a nice way of phrasing that a belief really should be criticized, just like opinions. The closest I’ve come by reading these comments is delusion.
Even things you are certain to be true can turn out to be false. Does that make all knowledge opinion?
There’s a reason it’s seen as cowardly to say “Well that’s just my opinion” when one says something generally disturbing. Opinions are meant to be flexible and malleable. Values and beliefs, less so.
So for one example, let’s say “women belong in the home and shouldn’t be working or voting.” If you believe that, you think that’s how society would function better, the family unit, etc… by strictly limiting what others are able or meant to achieve in life.
Thats why that strawman ‘opinion’ would get pushback. It isn’t a passing thought. It’s more than that and has become a belief or a value, something that is harder to challenge.
I gotta say that this was actually a fantastic question. I enjoyed thinking this out.
I don’t think it’s cowardly to say that something is your opinion. It’s just unnecessary, of course it’s your opinion.
Everything you know and think is your brain processing information it gathered. You see everything through a kind of opinion filter. That’s also what makes it practically impossible to not fall victim to logical fallacies and cognitive biases. Our brains are built to interpret the world, form opinions and whatnot, not to be fact-machines.
So yeah, what you know is an opinion based on info you gathered
I agree with you on fundamentals but I think there’s something in their argument that should be considered that they couldn’t really articulate. Researchers have found that there are specific portions of the brain that are associated with spirituality. I agree with you that it’s fundamentally an opinion, but it’s important to recognize that it does light up people’s brains differently than a standard opinion, and that sense of spirituality does impact how people connect with other people through that feeling.
Now, of course that’s just entirely internal to our brains and our internal world simulations and has no impact on the real reality around us, but it’s still important to take into account our brain functions when considering how people feel things.
Fear and Trembling is an extrapolation of details surrounding the story of Abraham traveling up the mountain to sacrifice his son, this meme does the same only through a modern lens
I think all of them were con-men. Just read about Joseph Smith and Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, people who created two modern religions. The former had dozens criminal charges including banking fraud and treason and the latter was forging bank checks.
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