No surprise here, people tending toward bigotry are having problems coping with complexity and change. What might this suggest about strategies to overcome prejudice?
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No surprise here, people tending toward bigotry are having problems coping with complexity and change. What might this suggest about strategies to overcome prejudice?
I think memorized, rehearsed and parroted prayers are not prayers at all. I think people say them mindlessly with little thought to the actual words and/or meaning. They remind me more of a mantra – words or sounds meant to be mindlessly repeated over and over, seldom having an actual meaning but meant to clear the mind of outside interference. Ohm comes to mind in this reference.
Barbara, I have no doubt that rote prayers are often said without thought of meaning. However, my young years were spent in a conservative church where prayers were never rote. They were often pleas for God to fix things or provide for needs which I find ok at times but usually shallow and pushing a simplistic, magical view of God that I do not agree with. Another kind of prayer we had in the same church was praise prayer full of flowery words for God and thanks for his bounteous love. As a youngster these prayers were often way too long for my consumption and full of words I did not really understand. My point is that non-rote prayers can be just as meaningless as rote prayers.
On the other hand, when I finally started going to an Episcopal church as a teenager, I found that the rote prayers led my thoughts through many of the things I wanted to pray about — people I cared about, current events, life in the church and the universe, etc. They also gave me a since of a larger God than the one that fulfills wishes and needs our praise. I learned to pray for needs and to thank the universe for providing for our needs in a conservative church but I learned to pray to the God I know and love and seek to understand in a church with rote prayers.
Finally, in groups like the Friends and with some of my Buddhist friends, I learned what it means to pray in silence and to use mantras to block out all other thoughts so that I can listen and hear what the universe is saying to me and I can become at one with that present universe and that is heaven to me. I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to pray. Neither do I think that prayer, rote or extemporaneous or silent, is related to IQ.
Jim, you have often made the connection between prejudice and fear. It seems to me that the link between prejudice and fear is reasonable and rational. It is also rational to me that our schools and our parents teach those with lower IQ to be fearful of all kinds of things in order to keep them safe. Therefore, the link between prejudice and low intelligence is not too much of a surprise. However, fear links prejudice to what is in all of us and can be dealt with. Whereas the link with lower IQ singles out a segment of people and thereby generates prejudice itself. I don’t like this article even though the statement is likely true, the statement itself seems to be prejudicial and to engender even more fear and prejudice. Fear which we all experience is more likely the root cause of prejudice and seeing that in our selves gives us a way to work on being less prejudice and even less fearful.