What is a Rational Understander!
I have never taken the view that I should attack an individual’s personal beliefs, neither have I really ever condemned religious followers as being those stupid people that have never thought for themselves, doing this would never really provide benefit. So I assume the position of explaining the world as I think that it should be seen, this is a perfectly acceptable thing to do this with science after all my own personal scientific knowledge is particular and this allows me to review arguments within my base of many years of knowledge to create a judgement call. When we come to religion it is a little more complex, since as a nonbeliever I lack belief I am put at the point of ‘he has no belief therefore, he cannot understand faith’. This is true, I really don’t understand why something is believed with no evidence at all, other than a personal hope or feeling that it is somehow in the realm of possibility of being actually true. At the heart of it all there is no way that I can prove with evidence that God is not real, just like I can’t disprove that psychoanalysis is a true reflection of anyone’s internal thought processes and this is in fact the major problem. Without being God like myself, falsification of God or Psychoanalysis is not possible, I can do something else though and that is look at the usefulness and likelihood that these things are real. This is what a Rational Understander is, a person that can look at the world with its evidence and make that judgement call.
Before we go on, let me first acknowledge that I am fully aware that Understander is not a real word and I just made it up. Still, there are a couple of other things I think that are important, the first taken from science is the idea that no matter how firm your own belief on anything you happen to be passionate about you can always be completely wrong about it. Freud really should have learnt this and it would have saved a lot of people their distress. Having said that if someone can come to understand a different point of view and still retain their original belief, we can not only respect them for that, we must also question ourselves at the end of this process. This of course does not mean that if you are a catholic and you learn a couple of things about Islam this means that I respect you, there are limits! Understanding is a very difficult thing to do; close to the edge of impossible, since it is not just the rules of a religion that makes religion work inside someone’s head, it is also their family, society and a whole host of other things. In the language instinct Pinker comments that what I am doing is not just writing this, I am also communicating the thought processes and how I add up my information, if we assume that is what everyone does, from this we can say that it is not always necessary to understand in a complete sense we just need to understand how people get from one point to the next one along, with a clear justification for it. It is then you can apply the rational understanding.
If you can understand how people get from position A to position B and then not only see what else A can cause but also can come to realise something which might cause position B without position A being present at all, that makes you a Rational Understander. In other words if you embrace the skill of critical thinking then that is what it is all about. I mentioned before the rules of respect, they do not include the following: Not making sense or producing circular arguments especially those that relies on faith in order for it to work. This brings me to belief where evidence suggests that it is not true and requires me to buy into the whole thing before I am allowed to discover the secret. And last of all anything that causes harm and adversely affects an individual, or attacks those that are part of a group that they have not chosen to be in. This pretty much covers all religions, psychoanalysis, horoscopes, ghost hunters, religious science (creationists mostly), superstitions and a whole bunch of other things which most likely will not make me very popular at all! In all honesty this should make me a very judgemental person still I don’t think this is the case. If everyone just carries on with their belief without it ever bothering me I would never have a problem with it, still this is not what happens. I will make this point here though; I have on my blog made remarks about religion mostly about particular things I find distasteful and what keeps going on is people leave comments defending their religion. If I thought these objections were point full I would have never written the stuff in the first place which is why these comments get deleted. Deal with the issues and not the defence just for the sake of it!
The very last thing that I will say here is that I don’t think that it is right to be confrontational with anyone that believes in religion, psychoanalysis, horoscopes, ghost hunting, religious science (creationists mostly again), superstitions or any of the other things. In a free society people are allowed to believe in what they want without judgement from me, it is their right. If at any point they try to push their belief on me it is the time when I can go on the offensive. If someone presents something to you then you have the right to question it, it is pointless however, to argue with someone when you know you will make yourself frustrated and neither one of you will walk away with anything good. Stick to what you believe, share that and explain it to people and in time maybe you will slowly change people’s minds. After all ‘hardcore atheists’ only achieve pushing people away from them, those of us that explain and tell how our minds have worked things out, are stronger for it. This is a long way of saying be kind, thoughtful and accept that we have our biases let’s try to help each other out by making them clear.
