My Support Forums - View Single Post - Difficulty hating/judging religious people

Rapunzel · 06:00 PM

First of all, I would like to thank you for being open, honest, and willing to work on this problem. That you can recognize the problem is a first step and shows that you are recognizing that you have a bias, rather than that 'all religious people are bad.'

Lynn makes a good point about understanding where your anger is coming from. I am a religious person and I don't believe that I have ever done anything harmful to you. Most likely, either someone has hurt or offended you in some way, or perhaps you were taught to hate religion by someone who was hurt or offended or taught to hate religion. When you over-generalize this hate to all religious people, you are transferring feelings from a situation from your past when you felt this way for one reason or another to a new situation based on a single cue that reminds you of the past situation(s). One word for this is transference. Another is stereotyping, or discrimination.

Stereotyping based on religion is very similar to stereotyping based on race or gender or any other trait that could define a group of people. While I don't know your experience and how your bias developed, I know a few general theories that explain prejudice. George Kelly http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/kelly.html theorized that people categorize the world in dichotomous categories, starting with the basic construct of good / bad. We tend to group things (or people) up into categories. Sometimes we make errors and need to reconstrue our mental map of the world. Sometimes our constructs can be too tight, and do not readily admit new items or experience. If your construct is "All religious people are hateful and judgemental" then it will be hard for you to accept that people can be religious but not hateful and judgemental. Changing our personal constructs is disorienting and we tend to resist it, but it can be done, especially when we are aware of the contructs that we want to change.

In other words, maybe open yourself to the possibility that there are religious people who are accepting and kind to others. Look for them. Try to accept them. (I hope you will be able to see me as religious and also accepting, kind, and nonjudgemental).

Maybe it would be hard for you to jump in and discuss religion with me, but if you can start small and get to know people who are religious as people, find things that you have in common with them (people are generally more alike than different), etc., it would help you to form new constructs such as maybe:
"some religious people have similar concerns about the environment as I do"
"some religious people do their best to be good friends, neighbors, parents, ..."
"some religious people enjoy some of the same sports or books or leisure activities that I do."
You probably get the idea. It isn't really different from how someone might overcome a prejudice against people of any race or culture, etc. When we get to know people as individuals, steotypes fall away.

The other theorist who stands out in understanding prejudice is George Allport. He describes "pigeonholes of the mind" into which we try to make everything fit. Here's a nice summary:

Quote:

The Nature of Prejudice

Featuring Material from:

Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979

Framework

Man is not born prejudiced; rather, prejudice is learned. By its very nature, prejudice denies individual human dignity and breaks the fundamental unity among people. Gordon W. Allport defines prejudice as a hostile attitude or feeling toward a person solely because he or she belongs to a group to which one has assigned objectionable qualities. Allport stresses that this hostile attitude is not merely a hasty prejudgment before one knows the facts. It is a judgment that resists facts and ignores truth and honesty. Thus, prejudice blinds one to the facts and creates a kind of poison in a relationship. Although prejudice in daily life is ordinarily a matter of dealing with individual people, it also entails unwarranted ideas concerning a group as a whole. Negative religious, ethnic, or racial prejudice (based on grouping by religion, nationality, or race) is an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization or stereotyping. According to Allport, it may be felt or expressed, and it is directed toward a group as a whole or toward an individual because he or she is a member of that group. Religious, ethnic, or racial prejudice persists for several reasons. Prejudice gives an individual a false sense of identity and self-worth; that is, a person may discriminate against others to make himself feel more powerful and to elevate his own self-esteem. Also, categorization and stereotyping often offer a convenient scapegoat for individual or group problems.
Prejudice, then, is generally the way one thinks or feels about a particular person or group. Discrimination is acting on that negative prejudice. Allport further explains that negative prejudice and discrimination are expressed in escalating levels of violence. These escalating levels of discrimination move from spoken abuse to genocide in the following order:
1. Spoken Abuse (which he calls Antilocution)
2. Avoidance
3. Discrimination or Legalized (Institutionalized) Racism
4. Violence Against People and Property
5. Extermination or Genocide (the systematic attempt to destroy an entire people)
Allport contends that minor forms of prejudice such as spoken abuse have a way of growing into more virulent and destructive forms of discrimination and violence. In the following excerpts from The Nature of Prejudice, author Gordon Allport identifies the problem of prejudice, describes the escalating levels of violence associated with prejudice, and defines the meaning of scapegoat in ancient and modern society.

The following excerpts have been taken from:

THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE

By Gordon W. Allport

a member of Perseus Books. L.L.C.

From: "What is the Problem?"

For myself, earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my activities, I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national and individual . . . I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices—made up of likings and dislikings—the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, and antipathies.

Charles Lamb

In Rhodesia a white truck driver passed a group of idle natives and muttered, "They’re lazy brutes." A few hours later he saw natives heaving two-hundred pound sacks of grain onto a truck, singing in rhythm to their work. "Savages," he grumbled. "What do you expect?"
In one of the West Indies it was customary at one time for natives to hold their noses conspicuously whenever they passed an American on the street. And in England, during the war, it was said, "The only trouble with the Yanks is that they are over-paid, over-sexed, and over here."
Polish people often called the Ukrainians "reptiles" to express their contempt for a group they regarded as ungrateful, revengeful, wily, and treacherous. At the same time Germans called their neighbors to the east "Polish cattle." The Poles retaliated with "Prussian swine"—a jibe at the presumed uncouthness and lack of honor of the Germans.
In South Africa, the English, it is said, are against the Afrikaner; both are against the Jews; all three are opposed to the Indians; while all four conspire against the native black.
In Boston, a dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church was driving along a lonesome road on the outskirts of the city. Seeing a small Negro boy trudging along, the dignitary told his chauffeur to stop and give the boy a lift. Seated together in the back of the limousine, the cleric, to make conversation, asked, "Little Boy, are you a Catholic?" Wide-eyed with alarm, the boy replied, "No sir, it’s bad enough being colored without being one of those things."
Pressed to tell what Chinese people really think of Americans, a Chinese student reluctantly replied, "Well, we think they are the best of the foreign devils." This incident occurred before the Communist revolution in China. Today’s youth in China are trained to think of Americans as the worst of the foreign devils.
In Hungary, the saying is, "An anti-Semite is a person who hates the Jews more than is absolutely necessary."
No corner of the world is free from group scorn. Being fettered to our respective cultures, we, like Charles Lamb, are bundles of prejudice.

From: "Acting Out Prejudice"

What people actually do in relation to groups they dislike is not always directly related to what they think or feel about them. Two employers, for example, may dislike Jews to an equal degree. One may keep his feelings to himself and may hire Jews on the same basis as any workers—perhaps because he wants to gain goodwill for his factory or store in the Jewish community. The other may translate his dislike into his employment policy, and refuse to hire Jews. Both men are prejudiced, but only one of them practices discrimination. As a rule discrimination has more immediate and serious social consequences than has prejudice.
It is true that any negative attitude tends somehow, somewhere, to express itself in action. Few people keep their antipathies entirely to themselves. The more intense the attitude, the more likely it is to result in vigorously hostile action.
We may venture to distinguish certain degrees of negative action from the least energetic to the most.
1. Antilocution. Most people who have prejudices talk about them. With like-minded friends, occasionally with strangers, they may express their antagonism freely. But many people never go beyond this mild degree of antipathetic action.
2. Avoidance. If the prejudice is more intense, it leads the individual to avoid members of the disliked group, even perhaps at the cost of considerable inconvenience. In this case, the bearer of prejudice does not directly inflict harm upon the group he dislikes. He takes the burden of accommodation and withdrawal entirely upon himself.
3. Discrimination. Here the prejudiced person makes detrimental distinctions of an active sort. He undertakes to exclude all members of the group in question from certain types of employment, from residential housing, political rights, educational or recreational opportunities, churches, hospitals, or from some other social privileges. Segregation is an institutionalized form of discrimination, enforced legally or by common custom.
4. Physical attack. Under conditions of heightened emotion prejudice may lead to acts of violence or semi-violence. An unwanted Negro family may be forcibly ejected from a neighborhood, or so severely threatened that it leaves in fear. Gravestones in Jewish cemeteries may be desecrated. The Northside’s Italian gang may lie in wait for the Southside’s Irish gang.
5. Extermination. Lynchings, pogroms, massacres, and the Hitlerian program of genocide mark the ultimate degree of violent expression of prejudice.
This five-point scale is not mathematically constructed, but it serves to call attention to the enormous range of activities that may issue from prejudiced attitudes and beliefs. While many people would never move from antilocution to avoidance; or from avoidance to active discrimination, or higher on the scale, still it is true that activity on one level makes transition to a more intense level easier. It was Hitler’s antilocution that led Germans to avoid their Jewish neighbors and erstwhile friends. This preparation made it easier to enact the Nürmberg laws of discrimination which, in turn, made the subsequent burning of synagogues and street attacks upon Jews seem natural. The final step in the macabre progression was the ovens at Auschwitz.
From the point of view of social consequences much "polite prejudice" is harmless enough—being confined to idle chatter. But unfortunately, the fateful progression is, in this century, growing in frequency. The resulting disruption in the human family is menacing. And as the peoples of the earth grow ever more interdependent, they can tolerate less well the mounting friction.

From: "Meaning of Scapegoat"

The term scapegoat originated in the famous ritual of the Hebrews, described in the Book of Leviticus (16:20-22). On the Day of Atonement a live goat was chosen by lot. The high priest, robed in linen garments, laid both his hands on the goat’s head, and confessed over it the iniquities of the children of Israel. The sins of the people thus symbolically transferred to the beast, it was taken out into the wilderness and let go. The people felt purged, and for the time being, guiltless.
The type of thinking here involved is not uncommon. From earliest times the notion has persisted that guilt and misfortune can be shifted from one man’s back to another. Animistic thinking confuses what is mental with what is physical. If a load of wood can be shifted, why not a load of sorrow or a load of guilt?
Nowadays we are likely to label this mental process projection. In other people we see the fear, anger, lust that reside primarily in ourselves. It is not we ourselves who are responsible for our misfortunes, but other people. In our common speech we recognize this failing in such phrases as "whipping-boy," "taking it out on the dog," or "scapegoat."
http://schoolwires.henry.k12.ga.us/4..._Prejudice.doc

If we can recognize our prejudices, then we can change them. Pretty much everyone has prejudices. Most of us simply are not aware of our own prejudices because we are used to them and have not questioned them much.