In For A Pinch, In For A Pound

While fundamentalist religious believers certainly have a lot of ridiculous beliefs, I actually can understand their position much better than I can understand the position of the more nominal believers — as the old saying goes, in for a pinch; in for a pound.

If someone is going to believe in any religious doctrine, why bother stopping short. If someone is going to accept the concept of a god, then they have to account for how they came about this concept and how they know anything about the deity in question. Holy books are generally the source of this knowledge. So how can someone accept that and then turn around and reject much of the holy book?

At least with the fundamentalists, they claim to accept their holy book 100% even if they don’t actually live up to that claim. I say that, because the way I see it no one really accepts holy books like the Bible 100%. The Bible advocates for killing gay people, atheists, and adulterers. Not even the Westboro Baptist Church follows those thing and they are arguably the most fundamentalist Christians we have in America.

It seems that all religious believers are cafeteria style believers. In actually, no one really accepts their religious beliefs fully. It really is just a matter of degrees. Although, at least with the fundamentalists, they seem to believe that they are accepting their beliefs fully and they certainly do try to take their beliefs seriously.

Nominal believers merely accept the minimum amount of ridiculous dogma they have to in order to continue to justify themselves as believers. The problem is that now they are put in a position where they have to justify why they don’t follow various verses of their holy book. This creates an enormous amount of cognitive dissidence.

I really don’t understand how someone can accept that Jesus rose from the dead, but the idea that God created Eve from Adam’s rib is just too ridiculous to be believed. In my mind, both are equally ridiculous and I don’t see how one can accept one without accepting the other. You either buy in to the fantasy world or you don’t.

The evidence however shows that I am wrong in this understanding. There seems to be plenty of religious believers who will laugh at the ridiculousness of those who claim to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and yet the second that I start laughing at the ridiculousness of the virgin birth story, they are the ones who are quick to cry out about how offended they are that I could even question their beliefs.