When I was a freshman in college over a decade ago, I was given this link to a youtube video basically asserting that all agnostic people are atheist. At the time I was fairly agnostic, and being told this felt wrong, like my thoughts were being miscategorized, but I didn’t have a great way to explain that feeling at the time. The framework above is ultimately how I parsed through that feeling to better understand myself and others. That’s why I started thinking about it.
I think a person’s belief (or lack thereof) is a reflection of how they think, so adding clarity to what and how one believes or doesn’t believe something can grant a better understanding of how they think. And I like understanding other people and how they think.
I don’t really understand how this is othering, could you elaborate on that?
Well, the reasons you give are better than most. Typically people that feel your compulsion to categorize are doing it to argue others aren’t ‘unbelieving’ the right way or for the right reasons. Comedians cracking jokes that agnostics are cowards, hardcore atheists condescending any attempt at mysticism, mystics calling atheists blind immoral fools, and so on.
It’s the same with leftism and how they constantly defeat themselves by splintering into subsets of people who aren’t left enough or too centrist, etc… We live in a culture desperate to form cliques to our detriment imo.
When I was a freshman in college over a decade ago, I was given this link to a youtube video basically asserting that all agnostic people are atheist. At the time I was fairly agnostic, and being told this felt wrong, like my thoughts were being miscategorized, but I didn’t have a great way to explain that feeling at the time. The framework above is ultimately how I parsed through that feeling to better understand myself and others. That’s why I started thinking about it.
I think a person’s belief (or lack thereof) is a reflection of how they think, so adding clarity to what and how one believes or doesn’t believe something can grant a better understanding of how they think. And I like understanding other people and how they think.
I don’t really understand how this is othering, could you elaborate on that?
Well, the reasons you give are better than most. Typically people that feel your compulsion to categorize are doing it to argue others aren’t ‘unbelieving’ the right way or for the right reasons. Comedians cracking jokes that agnostics are cowards, hardcore atheists condescending any attempt at mysticism, mystics calling atheists blind immoral fools, and so on.
It’s the same with leftism and how they constantly defeat themselves by splintering into subsets of people who aren’t left enough or too centrist, etc… We live in a culture desperate to form cliques to our detriment imo.