• Yes, horrible beliefs make a person horrible.

    but No, I don’t hate someone just because they are horrible. Horribleness is not an immutable property. People are horrible because they lack the ethical skills to be better, and those ethical skills can be taught, including the ability to examine and reject horrible beliefs.

  • Neither really. Sort of.

    There are certainly inherently repugnant beliefs, but beliefs in and of themselves are harmless - they’re just a particular pattern of firing neurons in a brain. They literally cannot bring harm to others just in and of themselves.

    The thing that makes some beliefs horrible is not the mere holding of them, but the things one who holds them is likely to do. It’s those acts that are the real evil - the beliefs are just a foundation, or a trigger.

    Now, all that said, I would hazard that it’s exceedingly rare at best (and arguably impossible) for anyone to hold noxious beliefs without them in some way affecting their behavior, so the mere holding of noxious beliefs can certainly serve as a justification for the conclusion that the person in question is in fact horrible. Still though, to be (perhaps overly) precise, I’d say that it’s not the belief itself that makes them a horrible person, but merely that the belief makes it quite likely that they’ll act in ways that make them (or reveal them to be) horrible people.

  • All of them. Beliefs are what makes a person good/bad. Any bad actions come from those bad beliefs, but belief must exist first.

    Let me give a very simplistic example. Most of us agree that murder is bad. In order for someone to commit murder they must first believe there are some cases where killing another person is justified or even desirable specifically for them. And not commonly agreed on ones like self-defense.

    We even encode this difference in laws. Killing with intention is called “murder”, while if it’s done unintentionally it’s a lesser change of “manslaughter”. Belief is what decides severity of the action.

  • Yes, your beliefs shape how you act, so shitty beliefs will make you a shitty person. Not shitty all the time, but shitty often enough that anyone can point at the person and see it’s mainly due to the belief.

    Some examples: racists, fascists, ancaps

  • Well, yesterday a cashier decided it was a good idea to tell me, a hippie looking transwoman, that she’s not racist, but what is Turkey doing in European football? And yeah she immediately crossed that threshold and went on my asshole list.

    Of course I can come up with a gazillion excuses for why she said that. She doesn’t know our own history. She doesn’t know geography. She’s just trying to fit in to her social group. I can go on and on. But still, what she is saying is damaging on a purely racist basis. She is old enough to realize that.

    However, I wouldn’t use the word hate. I know what you mean, and that’s what I am responding to rn, but I don’t genuinely want to hate anyone. Hate is more corrosive to the vessel than that which it is poured upon.

  •  GBU_28   ( @GBU_28@lemm.ee ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    32 months ago

    Hate someone for their actions.

    Be suspicious of people for their beliefs.

    Avoid people if their beliefs are so concrete and premeditative that you believe they will turn their bad beliefs into actions.

  •  ulkesh   ( @ulkesh@beehaw.org ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    32 months ago

    Actions make a person horrible. Beliefs lead to a person’s actions. So if one holds horrible beliefs, it’s likely they will perform horrible actions — thus a horrible person.

    The “hate the sin, not the sinner” is nonsense. I can absolutely hate the sinner if an action they commit is immoral, unethical, and/or damages other people. However, there are very few people in this world that I would say I hate.

  • Well, yeah, a fascist is a horrible person, and so on. But I don’t think “horrible person” is a particularly useful or meaningful category. I don’t care if you’re a good or bad person; I care what you’re doing, what effect you have on other people and on society at large, and if the answers to those questions are negative, is there anything that can be done about it? If a fascist can be reformed, then we should do whatever we can do make that happen. If they’re a lost cause, well… I like to believe that no one is a completely lost cause. The solution if someone is truly a lost cause is not particularly nice or humane.

  • Holding a belief and acting on said belief are very different things.

    There are crazies who believe certain types of people they don’t like should be exterminated, but so long as they don’t act on those beliefs I don’t consider it horrible or immoral.