Why when some nutball Christian attacks a Planned Parenthood clinic does my side of the debate insist on identifying him (accurately) with his Christian dominionist fucked-up faction, but the same people will go off their rockers vituperating on why Islam has nothing at all in any way to do with why, say, it was Islamists who committed the attacks in Paris and not for instance Hindu believers?
Captain, I think I’ve detected a major inconsistency in belief shield harmonics.
Most people on this “side” can identify the differences between different Christian factions and are either Christian, raised Christian or grew up surrounded by Christians. They also deal with people who can and will differentiate between different types of Christians. You’re lucky if the people on this “side” know if Sunni and Shia are different types of Muslims, let alone how they’re different or why. This is like someone not knowing the difference between Protestants and Catholics. People literally don’t know that Sikhism and Islam are different religions and don’t care. And Hinduism? Come on. Most people simply don’t bother to educate themselves, even to the extent of Wikipedia-ing something, if they will suffer no social penalty for doing so.
Can you really argue nuance and difference with people who keep making huge category errors and have no interest in learning or absorbing otherwise, especially if you haven’t bothered to educate yourself? Are the undecided people going to bother to learn more and new, complicating information? No, they’re just going to go with the simplest argument that fits their own biases.
About this — and perhaps I am just misreading your comment — I was more talking about the people who believe that nothing at all can be ascribed to the influence of Islam, while completely “explaining” the Planned Parenthood shooting by religious influences and indoctrination.
This is not a cogent worldview. It is found primarily on the left, is a result of some form of white guilt, and I can’t understand why it doesn’t seem to cause any cognitive dissonance at all.
I figured you were talking about white guilt. However, just white guilt isn’t enough to explain this phenomenon. Most of those people do not have the knowledge to differentiate properly and would not find a way to acquire this knowledge. It’s another side of the deep-seated, unexamined belief that people that are the most like them in background and belief have complexities and have fine differences that need to paid attention to while others are very simple and can be explained in black and white terms. This is not a left/right wing thing. The idea that you might want to find out more about whom you defend/villify never enters their minds, not even at the most basic level. It makes for very stupid public debates pitched at level of understanding of very stupid people. Imagine a debate between phrenologists and palm readers pitched at illiterate farmers being watched by Marie Curie — this is how stupid religious debates feel.