Illogical - posted at 00:11

Yesterday I recalled one of my earliest childhood memories.

It happened when we were living in Omaha, so I was probably about four years old.

I was playing on the playground when an older girl - perhaps about six or seven - asked me "Are you a Christian?"

I didn't know what that meant. I told her as much, and told her that I was Catholic. This apparently wasn't good enough for her, because she really wouldn't have much to do with me after that point.

It got me thinking about how everything about religion is so much more socially constructed than we realize, and that it's just really sad that it can begin to affect the way that people treat each other at such a young, naïve age, before we have any conception at all of what these things really mean. This girl surely had no idea of what it truly meant to be a Christian, all she knew was that someone who was different from her (or too young to know how similar they were) was someone that she didn't want to play on the playground with.

It's really similar to asking a young child about someone's race. They can perceive that a person has a certain skin color, but they have no idea of any of the social consequences of that color.

It's really sad that a child's mind, a blank slate, can so easily be taught to hate and/or exclude based on something arbitrary that someone has no control over - like their religion at age five, or their race at any point in life.

When you think about it, so much of what orbits around religion and race are based in fear. My experience has been that most, if not all, arguments that push for religion or racism are rooted in fear and scare tactics. All of my moments of doubting whatever non-theism I have had are based in the fear that was instilled in me at a very young age. All of these doubts vanish the moment that I think about the issue in a logical frame and decide that they just don't make any sense. As far as race goes, well, it's really illogical to hate. It just is. I've never felt that I had anything to fear from people who are superficially different from me, so I've never doubted anything about my viewpoints on racism.

Speaking of social constructions.

We have been talking about the problem of evil and free will in Philosophy recently. I would have liked to get more involved in these discussions, but I just couldn't do it. You can't reason with a mind that has been trained to spout dogma when confronted with something that challenges its doctrine. All I ever heard were these asinine circular arguments that did nothing to progress the discussion. In fact, they often pulled us back two or three or seven steps.

One of the arguments that really riled my feathers came from a girl who, for a change, wasn't just spouting Christian doctrine that was completely inconsistent with the point that can been brought up previously (why is it that I can use the Christian point of view to construct my non-theist arguments, but so many people in my class were incapable of countering non-theist viewpoints with any comments that were made without the assumption of God? But I digress). She was arguing that free will must exist because without it we could have no concept of justice, because without free will no one is responsible for their actions. This argument might sound all well and good for a moment, but only just a moment, once you begin to think about it.

Justice is a completely arbitrary human social construction. There is no notion of justice in the animal kingdom. Animals kill each other all the time, fight over mates, and just do some things that are really bloody terrible from our Wonderfully Civilized Viewpoint. Humans, however, have this notion of justice. It's true, we do. But it's an arbitrary social construction. You cannot argue for the existence of free will, an inherent trait (which it would be if it does, in fact, exist) with an arbitrary human social construction. Sure, it's logically valid to say "Humans have free will, therefore we have justice." It's not logically equivalent to say "Humans have a sense of justice, therefore we have free will." We just spent a week talking about how there are all these nice concepts that don't actually exist in reality (Platonic forms), did it ever occur to her that justice is one of them as well?

I have more I want to write about, however these topics will fit well into my next post. Enter the segway...