Why is discrimination on the basis of religious belief often considered on-par with discrimination on the basis on race or cultural background or gender in terms of 'unfairness'?
You can't reasonably help any of the latter, so if someone doesn't consider you upon your individual merits and instead makes judgements upon you based upon considering you a typical _____ (black/white, man/woman, french/german) without knowing any better, then that's unfair.
But you can help which religious community your a member of, considering all the major religions in modern nations are open to converts. Even if you don't convert, you can just change your mind with respect to what you profess to believe, right?
Moreover, if religion is at some level a particular set of beliefs, and if you can't discriminate against someone for their knowledge and what they profess to believe in, then how can you have a meritocracy? Why is religious belief unique in this respect as compared with political belief or opinion or knowledge on any other topic?
I've always wondered this, but I usually end up being called either a fedora-tiper or a Nazi when I ask people this
It deals with transcendental issues such as the ultimate meaning of one's life and reality so it's a bit more sancrosanct than 'democracy lmfao'
>>315557
>>Moreover, if religion is at some level a particular set of beliefs, and if you can't discriminate against someone for their knowledge and what they profess to believe in, then how can you have a meritocracy?
it is choice also to not discriminate on the colour of the skin.
you are obviously non-religious, and yet you cast judgements on religionS by through clichés
you talk about knowledge without even having taken an epistemology class
you talk about meritocracy like a good little liberal.libertarian, and yet, after centuries of human rights, the liberals.libertarians remain unable to tell us what merit is.
in conclusion: you are bad at trolling, but the best part is that you think you are good, so it makes for quite a funny thread.
10/10
The primary means by which religion is disseminated has been and is parent to child. "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it". There's a sense in which you get to choose your religion, but for the vast majority of the world the only choice you actually get to make is to stick or twist. The difficulty is only increased by religions which aren't as castrated and theoretical as Christianity or humanism-capitalism, for you can't argue that a Chandala chooses to "be" Hindu or that a Chinese chooses to "be" Confucian: rather they are born into social systems from which Hindu or Confucian notions and assumptions are more or less inseparable, they are acculturated to the "religion" of their people by the very fact that they are acculturated at all. The current state of modern affluent westerners getting to pick and choose from the buffet of world religion is historical anomaly.
>>315557
Discrimination is discrimination. One can discriminate against people who made all sorts of choices, such as joining the military or being married.
>>315676
>>315683
OK so I get that it's hard to change what one believes in "at will", and not everyone chooses their religion or what they think to be true (whatever their motivation).
But shouldn't adults be responsible for their own lives to some degree, including their knowledge and beliefs?
Where can you reasonably draw the line? Lots of what we believe and our personality and worldview must be a product of our upbringing as a child, yet we're still judged as though we're personally responsible for everything else but our religious beliefs.
Even if it's much harder to change what one believes with respect to religion than changing political affiliation, for example, can we really still group discrimination on the basis of religion into the same category as discrimination on the basis of race, gender, nationality? It's impossible to change the latter. That's a whole 'nother level of hard.
>>315557
>if you can't discriminate against someone for their knowledge and what they profess to believe in, then how can you have a meritocracy?
Discrimination is not conducive to a meritocracy because it's making judgements based on previous judgment of a group and not the individual.
What does a person's supernatural beliefs have to do with knowledgeable work outside of being ordained as a religious cleric? Judging someone is unfit to be a particle physicist because he lights candles in his living room for a picture of their dead parents is as arbitrary as judging them unfit because they can't grow chest hair.
>>315777
Discrimination isn't bad because you're judging someone for what they can't change, it's bad because you're judging someone for what or who they resemble and not who or what they are as a person.
>>315814
If somebody believed in young earth creationism that could reduce there 'merit' for biology and geology potentially
>>315557
because islam is the special snow flake of the world atm tbqh
>>315850
Sure, it might, and it'd might show in a merit-based test of their knowledge of biology and geology. Maybe. Not all biology and geology would involve Young Earth Creationism, but most important of all you don't know if this person allows his personal beliefs to conflict with the quality of his work. Maybe he's a raving lunatic, maybe he's quiet or he jumps through special hoops to translate good science into poor theology for his own benefit.
Until you know first hand, judging his merit without any test of his merit is not meritocratic.
>>315777
>But shouldn't adults be responsible for their own lives to some degree, including their knowledge and beliefs?
This practice is widespread, but is based on the social need to produce outgroups rather than any real "responsibility" people have for their actions. The buck doesn't stop with us. We are the media through which our actions are realized, not the ultimate sources of those actions. You are only capable of taking any action, such as choosing a religion, because your parents conceived you and because religions were created thousands of years ago and perpetuated to the present day. Surely all those who perpetuated and created and conceived share in the responsibility for your religious alignment? However if we view all societies throughout history as a continuous blob rather than a series of discrete groups, then we can't call anyone a faggot and beat him up, and that is just not to be borne.
The ancient Greeks had a concept called the pharmakos. The pharmakos was a man who had transgressed against the community -- whether by his actions (murder, rape, etc) or by what he was (a cripple, a madman, etc) didn't matter -- who was, in times of crisis and disaster, driven out from among the people and ritualistically executed. Symbolically, the people were driving out what was deformed and wicked about themselves, sending it away and destroying it. Ancient Hebrews performed a similar rite with a substitutional goat (the so-called scapegoat); the Christian foundational legend of the humiliation, abnegation, and murder of Christ recalls this ancient practice. What is bad about the community must be driven out by projection onto a bad thing which is then destroyed. This practice is necessary to perpetuate the essentially arbitrary sense of camaraderie and ingroupness upon which highly organized societies depend. Criminality, justice, and more general forms of moralized discrimination are just softer forms of this death ritual.
reminder that any doctrine is consistent only against its enemies, never once its enemies are defeated. this is what the proselytist occidental humanists face, since communism and monarchies have been castrated.
whoever will take power in liberal democracies will be the one assuming explicitly the latent authority that any liberal doctrine try to impose slyly through its legal and scientific structure.
>>315830
confusing wording but yeah. representative heuristics is the word you are looking for family
