An Excess of [Self] Righteous Indignation

Part of my reason for disengaging in what we Americans have been calling 'politics' has to do with my desire to see beyond the angry disonnance and the identity games and come to a (more) distilled understanding of the actual principles in conflict. I may come to find this to be futile, but it's better than being engaged in the pointless bickering. I have started to regard most atheists as part of the same formula, all derivative of the proper atheists. And this morning I found the exact spot to turn off a podcast from 2600, but more on that later.

Meanwhile check out this:

A new set of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology finds that atheists and agnostics report anger toward God either in the past or anger focused on a hypothetical image of what they imagine God must be like. Julie Exline, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University and the lead author of this recent study, has examined other data on this subject with identical results. Exline explains that her interest was first piqued when an early study of anger toward God revealed a counterintuitive finding: Those who reported no belief in God reported more grudges toward him than believers.

At first glance, this finding seemed to reflect an error. How could people be angry with God if they did not believe in God? Reanalyses of a second dataset revealed similar patterns: Those who endorsed their religious beliefs as “atheist/agnostic” or “none/unsure” reported more anger toward God than those who reported a religious affiliation.

Exline notes that the findings raised questions of whether anger might actually affect belief in God’s existence, an idea consistent with social science’s previous clinical findings on “emotional atheism.”

OK. So now you know.

By the way, I fall into that large category of the chastened after false hope. After all, I was once a Progressive. Now I am an aprogressive. I do, however, still believe in morality.  

The podcast I turned off was from the 2600 webcast and went on as many do with the usual back and forth among chums. And then the narrator, who had been doing a pretty good job suddenly made the podcast all about himself. You see he was horribly inconvenienced by airport security. If there's one thing  that anger me more than bourgeois self-pity, it is loud self-pity masked as a civilizing critique. This dude was full of it, and I don't quite understand how people get so far along in life without realizing how insignificant is their discomfiture.