Fanaticism
Via AngelMay
Ever heard of an Atheist or group of Atheists attacking, maiming, and killing people who don’t share their views?
Let me compress this thread so I don’t have to read it all.
Theist: Ha, what about Russia and China.
Atheist: They weren’t really killing each other over Atheism, it was over communism.
And things just go down hill from there. Until JamesBond gives us a detailed insightful post full of historical facts which I greatly enjoy reading.
Allow me to offer what I hope is a less biased assessment. People don’t kill people because they are atheists, theists, communists, or capitalists, they kill people because they are fanatics. They have lost perspective and think their personal ideology is the most important thing in the world and all other aspects of the world are secondary to it. Further they believe that any ideologies that compete with the chosen ideology are evil.
Evil is one of those things that can only really exist for the fanatic. The moderate has trouble elevating anything to evil. They can see differing opinions and can believe those holding the differing opinions are wrong, but are likely to hold that the person was misinformed or hasn’t considered the consequences. Only the fanatic holds the belief that those holding competing ideologies has as their single goal the destruction of society, economy, freedom, etc.
Many religions (certainly the Judeo-Christian variants) have at their core a reinforcement of the fanatic. They tell the story that this life is a temporary thing and only through properly following the tenets (whatever they may be) allows you to pass Go and collect $200. This automatically devalues all non-religious aspects of life and can easily lead to fanaticism. Any ideology that places itself as more important than all other aspect of the intellectual market place, and has a mechanism to reinforce that placement, will produce more than the normal number of fanatics.
Fanaticism occurs in other ideologies but since usually there is not mechanism to automatically devalue all the other aspects of life the person generally has to make more effort to become a fanatic of those ideologies. 50 years of cold war turned a lot of people into communist/capitalist fanatics because it was raised to such defining element of the culture. If we don’t get into another economically based cold war I would expect the number of economic system fanatics will drop over the next couple of generations to it’s pre-WWII level (Which would allow more mixing of the ideologies taking the good and avoiding the bad in each).
It can be said that on any given axis with two opposing ideologies on either end. There is the absolute moderate who holds no opinion either way in the center and those who are intensely emotionally invested in the axis on either end of the axis. I’m not advocating everyone be absolute moderates, but those who have a single axis way our of wack with the intensity of other axises in their lives will be willing to be driven to violence over a single aspect of their life. Those who allow an ideology to consume them have no reason to reject violence.
To avoid violence all ideas and ideologies need to be approached with trepidations and questions in the heart. In Moderation information can be honestly analyzed. Most disagreements can be overcome by education (either yours (learning you were wrong), or theirs (learning you were right)). For some arguments there is not enough information for that to be true. In those instances there in no reason (almost by definition) to become fanatic about the ideology, the world is better served by bringing more information to the axis as a whole.
Sorry got kind of abstract at the end there.
–Zafkiel