I don't think religion makes sense. I think I said I see it as the stuff of farce. But I do understand how people who believe certain premises, could be religious.
There are many religious people who believe they have had direct experiences with God- you must have seen some of their posts on SI. They've been "touched" by God; they have perceived the divine, and the divine makes "sense" to them, and they argue their belief is more logical than not believing. You may not have that kind of belief, but there are people all over SI who argue, for example, that a "God did it" explanation makes more "sense" than evolution (for example.) Now I have experience with the material world, so these claims make about as much sense to me as people who claim to have been anally probed by aliens, but if I accept that they believe in their experiences, then I can understand why they believe what they believe (even though I have never had the kinds of experiences they have, nor do I trust the way they are interpreting reality). Some people seem to be living in an essentially different world from the material world I inhabit. One of the premises I accept is that people experience reality differently- and you cannot expect your reality to be the only one, and the only way to meaningfully deal with people inhabiting an alternate reality, is to first try to understand what they believe, and what kind of reality they are experiencing.
To follow up on the preceding point, I think genocidal actors DO believe they can kill them all. You may not think it makes sense, but they do, because they believe in a completely different reality than you do. That's what they believed in Rwanda; that's what they believed in Germany, and I'm sure there are plenty of people in Iraq who do believe they can "kill them all". You may see the flaw in that, but you do not accept the premise that they do because you don't have their ability to believe in what they believe.
You may believe the coalition would have left months ago if the sectarian violence was less, but there are plenty of people in Iraq who think they have been invaded and occupied. They don't see us as the benevolent liberators, and they don't believe what you believe, that we would have left. They also probably don't believe we'll stay until Iraq is pacified. What they probably think is that if they keep fighting they will win- whatever they believe winning is (and their are many factions that believe in very different "wins").
So in all your analysis, you try to impose on "them" the truths that you believe. Your mistake (imo) is believing that the "flaws" you think are evident, are universally evident. |
