“Religious Kids are Jerks”

I read this article recently.. and as per usual, I started to get angry.
Especially angry because given the title of this article “Religious kids are Jerks” , and subsequent writings it infers that this person was wanting to make a statement against the supposed ‘intrinsic moral values’  that religion teaches, and convince people of their argument, but in my book… just a fail.

When a person that is supposed to be on ‘my side’; ie. the non-religion side on this case, but doesn’t argue their point correctly because essentially they’re going about it in the standard hippie liberalist kind of way by giving undeserved credit to religious folks, then it seems that they’ve lost my respect too.  Especially so considering that this writer does it whilst outlaying the initial hypothesis of the article.  Just disappointed.

“For many, organized religions like Christianity provide a moral compass. Holy books serve as guides that hold strict rules about what is right and wrong. It is only common sense to think that those who have religion in their lives are the ones with a strong sense of morals, while those who lack religious belief are left wandering in the dark, with no light to show them the right path from the wrong one. But as we have seen time and time again, common sense can be dead wrong.”

Ummm…. No. You’re thinking of ‘popular belief’. And yes that can be wrong, but common sense.. no.

Common is not meant to relate that this reasoning exists throughout the population, but that the environment that you are sensing is common.  As you can educate yourself from many definitions on the internet, it is supposed to be “independent of specialized knowledge, or training”,  it is simply “sound practical judgment- normal native intelligence”.

For example understanding how a rocket engine works cannot possibly be common sense because that environment is not common to everyone. However understanding that you need water to survive is definitely common sense, because everyone gets thirsty when they don’t have enough water.

There are things that definitely should be common sense; such as why you have to stop at a red traffic lights, that being that because the perpendicular one across from you is green, if you go when you are red, you will crash into them and be injured. For someone to not to have common sense in this means that they would actually have this environment, yet be somehow unable to figure it out. Like large numbers of Chinese people. (or perhaps they just don’t care)

However for a little boy who has grown up in a remote area of Kenya, this would NOT be common sense, because traffic lights would not be common to him.

Different people can draw different conclusions from it, and that is their belief. Common sense is therefore a generalization of how things work and it is simply a happy coincidence that many people believe the same thing given the same information, showing that many are capable of basic reasoning.

Sense- in the fact that you’re using your own basic understanding of how things work…originally from you 5 senses, to figure out how something behaves.

So anyway, this guy states that it is ‘only common sense to think that those who have religion in their lives are the ones with a strong sense of morals ‘ .  No. Again not common sense, but popular belief.  The fact that many people believe something, doesn’t necessarily make it true.

What’s more annoying is that the rest of the article is actually written pretty well. There’s a good amount of evidence quoted and its written in a generally well meaning format, however then you add the title back in, it would dispel those for who this article would have the greatest impact. –Religious people.  Atheist people and agnostic people already don’t care so much what religious people think because most of the world aren’t properly religious anymore, it’s simply a part of their culture.  Those that hold onto their religion ‘ because it teaches good moral behavior’ are clearly not avid readers of many of their own religious texts, and these are the people that are lacking common sense in terms of understanding morals.

The physical and social world generally teaches us through many situations, what we can and can’t do;  how we ourselves feel in reaction to another’s actions, which teaches us how we ourselves should act. It’s not that difficult. This environment is common. And therefore morals should be common sense.

Common sense is basically knowledge which should not have to be taught.

Yet, like it seems with some Chinese people with traffic lights, a few people just can’t figure it out for themselves which is where religion comes into fill the gap. This is great because the world becomes more ordered even if these people can’t figure it out for themselves.

Many non-religious people are already aware of all of this, so they should not be your target audience.  So who is the target audience for this kind of article?

There are basically 4 types of people for who this might be targeted towards:
1.) Religious people who consistently argue against non-believers
2.) Religious people who only care about the cultural value that religion has, and are unsure about the ‘moral value’
3) Non-believers, who don’t care what religious people think provided that they don’t harm other people, including making others more stupid
4.) Non-religious people who are only non-religious because they were raised in that kind of society and actually haven’t gone through the thought process of working out whether religion has benefits or not, yet sees a mass of proof against it.

With the way this article is written it seems it is aimed at convincing # 2 (the religious people who are questioning the ‘moral value’ that Religion apparently teaches you) but given the title, this steers them away.

The title is designed for #1 (religious people who want to argue) but the body of the text is too easy going and liberal….that’s not what they want. They want something they can argue against.

#4 they get drawn in with the ‘fighting’ title, but then fall asleep with the hippy consoling body.

#3 gets angry for the fact that the ones that need to be convinced are not because of the title.

By stating that its common sense for people to think religious people have greater morals, is incorrect.  Popular belief yes, but by using ‘common sense’ you are confusing people (religious people-the people you’re trying to convince) And saying that common sense is often proved wrong…. No. Its insinuating that the world we living in, the environment that we all share is so confusing that the conclusions we draw from what we sense will be wrong.  For those people that need religion for their moral foundation, they are already confused, they are already incapable of figuring this out for themselves; don’t give them a reason to believe that “common sense” is something to be challenged.

The basic common environment is not that difficult.  Just because a large amount of people believe one particular thing at a certain time, it doesn’t necessarily mean its common sense, it could for instance mean they’ve all be duped, or that they’re all idiots.

Popular belief isn’t necessarily common sense.