Darren New wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>> True. On the other hand, folks have been down that slippery slope
>>> already, so it's not obvious it's really a fallacy in this case.
>>> Indeed, in the USA, people are galloping down that slope.  (A number
>>> of high-profile religious leaders are publicly praying for the death
>>> of the president right now, for example.)
>>
>>   I also think (although I have nothing to back my opinion up) that the
>> idea that getting rid of all religion will fix these problems is
>> incorrect.
> 
> I agree entirely.  What it *will* do is to reduce the legitimacy of
> people behaving badly.
> 

It may reduce the behavior, though. There is the nice psychological echo
chamber effect, of sitting around a large crowd of people who, you
think, all believe the exact same things you do. It is one of the
reasons those mega-churches scare me so much.

When you have a crowd of people who all know that every one else
believes points A, B, and C, any person in that crowd might make some
connection to justify point X. They think that A, B, and C lead to X, so
therefore everyone else in the crowd must believe X too. It gets worse
when it hits "everyone I know believes X, therefore everyone believes
X." And it hits that point because people have to generalize. There is a
term, which I can't remember right now, for describing how many people a
person can actually know. It isn't a small number like 5, but after that
a person has to start generalizing the people around them. Large crowd,
lots of generalization, becomes lots of justification for their belief.
"They all believe in X, therefore we are right."

Won't fix the problem entirely, since religion isn't the only place this
happens. Any time a large crowd gets together and talks about the facts
they all agree on, it is bound for trouble.



Now I need to stop rambling on, take my antibiotics and go back to
sleep. I did way too much generalizing to make people fit the behavior I
wanted to explain. And now I just made the post more meta than I
intended. And now I broke meta . . .

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