Self-attribution & religion

Mr. Pedantic said:

Maybe before you make your next post, you might consider telling me how you rebutted and refuted a question. Via PM, I mean. Please stop contributing to this thread.

Click to expand...

Nope, the burden is on you to prove how I wouldn't, proving how I did it is just rewriting the rebuttal, your turn to attempt a rebuttal.

Mr. Pedantic said:

I had a thought (just bear with me on this!), and it was triggered by this post:



The purpose of this is not to critique the post itself per se, it's just so that if you want you can understand where my thought process went.

So it occurred to me that anecdotally, I have noticed many times where religious people (but Christians in particular) have attributed good things to God, but bad things to themselves (or others, as the case may be).

Now, we all practice self-serving, or self-attribution bias. For those who aren't familiar with the term, it's the practice of attributing successes to oneself while offloading the blame of failures onto others. We all do it - Wikipedia actually has some very good examples relating to everyday life.

What I got from Brian's post and my own musings was, perhaps part of many Christians' faith and belief in God is perpetuated by a kind of misrepresented self-attribution bias - they believe implicitly that all good deeds are attributable to God, but all bad things are attributable to them, and Adam and Eve (by implication). This would be true almost by definition, since the classical depiction of God is that of a perfect being, and it keeps the name of God unsullied by all the imperfections of this world, and removes the cognitive dissonances of having to explain away things like famine, plague, war, etc.

So my (rather long-winded and ineloquent) question is, has anyone done any research to further flesh out any details of this process, if it exists as a scientific/psychological concept?

Note that the question of whether God exists or not is kind of irrelevant. I don't want arguments on the existence of God. For the purposes of this I'm not interested in God as a physical/metaphysical being, but rather God as a concept that affects cognition and emotion.

Also note that this isn't to say that religious people are 'more' biased than non-religious people. As I say, everyone does this, and this was not intended as a slur on religious people.

Click to expand...

I would say that this phenomena is based or caused by two main areas of the "believer".

1) People have a myopic view of life, the world around them, and what the purpose of what we see actually is. Therefore, everything in the world that they see relates to them when really it is the other way around and they relate to the world around them. SO naturally if let's say they find a $100 bill in the middle of some field or something they are thankful for the blessing and are completely oblivious to the fact that somewhere there is a person feeling judged because they lost their $100 bill. The person feeling judged is also oblivious to the fact that the person who found the $100 bill actually had no money and needed to provide food for their sick child. Both people are self focused and extremely myopic, they fail to see themselves as they relate to the bigger picture of the world around them, everything that happens to them is about them and that is all. If you read the book of Genesis and Exodus you will encounter the story of how God raised up Israel into a nation for His name's sake. He did this by making them slaves in Egypt while He blessed Egypt with prosperity for apparently no other reason than they would "trickle down" their prosperity to their slaves. The Egyptians no doubt thought they must be doping something right to receive such a blessing while Israel must have felt that they did something wrong but neither was true.

2) People have an incorrect theological view of God. If you read Job, the first couple of chapters paint a really different view of God where He makes a wager with Satan that there is at least one person who will not stop praising God no matter what. God gives Satan the authority to do everything short of killing Job which Satan greatly obliges. Jesus told us to pray that God will not lead us into temptation because that is exactly what God did with His Son immediately after he was baptized. Instead we should choose the James chapter 5 position which is to not try to actually posit what the will of God is, rather we accept things as they are.

Of the two reasons I give, I would say that most Christians seem to be at about 70% reason 1 and 30% reason 2.

I have read, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that the eastern orthodox Christian churches do not hold to the doctrine of "original sin". They apparently believe that Jesus came to save us from the consequences of our own sins, not some sin of our ancestor.

So, not all Christians hold the same doctrines, and in fact, when you look into it, not all Christians have the same idea of God!

See, for instance: "A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam", by Karen Armstrong.

Gracchus said:

I have read, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that the eastern orthodox Christian churches do not hold to the doctrine of "original sin". They apparently believe that Jesus came to save us from the consequences of our own sins, not some sin of our ancestor.

Click to expand...

That's because The Bible never says we are born sinners, we have a sinful nature because sin is already in the world, therefore holding to being "born sinners" is not a Biblical/Christian Doctrine. we don't sin because it's in our blood, but because Adam's evil let others know what it is, like the good kid who enters a class with a bunch of bad kids, eventually he'll be influenced.