Total Lack Of Empathy

[agnosticator]

Maybe Stanley Milgram's experiments done in the 1960's have some relevance, since it was about obedience, authority, and peer pressure. People tend to put other's suffering aside for the group's agenda.

 

Here's a summary:http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm

[hereticzero]

The church members see any attack on their church as an attack on them personally. They attend and support the church, they pray there and as any church they will claim they are guided by the hand of God and are responsive to his will. Unfortunately, they accepted the person that led them as someone sent by God. The church members appointed their pastor because he was sent by God. Now they know differently but are unwilling to accept the fact that they did not receive a direct memo from God about this person. When the press or others start writing up their church for public scrutiny, they will take offense. They are embarrassed to admit that there is no God in the house they built for him and he does not like to talk to them.

[Guest kcdad]

Maybe Stanley Milgram's experiments done in the 1960's have some relevance, since it was about obedience, authority, and peer pressure. People tend to put other's suffering aside for the group's agenda.

 

Here's a summary:http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm

 

I think Milgram carried out his experiments with this question directly in his mind. How can normal, "good" people do such awful things. One of the conclusions I have drawn from Milgram, et al. is that IF we can pass the responsibility of our acts onto someone else (i.e. "the experimenter" in Milgram's test) we will do what we need to do to be accepted and avoid any negative consequences ourselves.

[Guest kcdad]

The church members see any attack on their church as an attack on them personally. They attend and support the church, they pray there and as any church they will claim they are guided by the hand of God and are responsive to his will. Unfortunately, they accepted the person that led them as someone sent by God. The church members appointed their pastor because he was sent by God. Now they know differently but are unwilling to accept the fact that they did not receive a direct memo from God about this person. When the press or others start writing up their church for public scrutiny, they will take offense. They are embarrassed to admit that there is no God in the house they built for him and he does not like to talk to them.

 

This is funny because I ran a poll not too long ago asking believers if God ever literally spoke to them, and out of all the replies only one said "YES". A few said they had heard God in their hearts or minds, or they "knew" someone to whom God had literally spoken, but the vast majority of Christian responders said, just as John Proctor in The Crucible is reported to have said... "The voice of God has never tickled my ear". (I told the one "YES" responder that he should see a psychiatrist if he was hearing voices... and what made him think it was God's voice?)