A Texas man who kidnapped a 13-year-old girl in San Antonio and sexually assaulted her multiple times while driving her to Southern California last year pleaded guilty to a federal kidnapping charge Friday as part of a plea agreement, the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said.
Steven Robert Sablan, 62, abducted the girl at gunpoint on or about July 6, 2023, in San Antonio and “engaged in sexual activity” with her while driving her to Long Beach, California, the plea agreement states.
“At the time of the crime, Sablan had no legal custody or familial relationship to the victim,” the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said in a news release.
Oh! This is the thing I’ve been reading about, with how people change their minds.
It turns out that for everyone, belief is partly to largely social. The brain values in-group membership and security much like how it values physical security. When you say something to someone that threatens their group security, the brain reacts similarly to if a bear had just walked into the room. There’s no cool analyzing of facts.
So you have someone who’s anti-trans and hangs out with their anti-trans church, and that’s a big part of their community. That’s their friends, family, and support. They get together, sing songs, and trash talk trans folks. Now, you come up to them and say “Hey, trans folks are people like anyone else and don’t deserve to be treated badly.” You’re an outsider. The brain looks at this like siding with you risks being ejected from the safety of the group to be eaten by wolves. That’s uncomfortable. So they make up excuses to resolve this. You’re a liar. You’re wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t understand it’s about protecting children. This is an exception that doesn’t prove anything. It was a false flag operation. Excuses. Excuses to protect group membership and resolve cognitive dissonance.
People are complex and hold many memberships simultaneously. This person belongs to a church, but they also have a family, and they may be in a political party, and a sports team. And the church may belong to a larger group like Christianity more generally.
One of the ways to get people to change their mind is to appeal to another group they’re a member of. Like, you probably can’t get a republican to recycle by appealing to environmentalism. Republicans have gone hard on the environment doesn’t matter. But you could probably make progress if you appealed to american exceptionalism. Only America can turn trash into treasure! That might appeal. That doesn’t make them feel like they’re clashing with a group.
This is also how stuff like qanon hook into people. Being part of the group feels good, and getting people to look at facts is going to be an uphill battle when it means risking that membership. And that’s on top of the whole “most people don’t want to admit fault”
Anyway. I digress. The specifics of christianity are a problem, but none of this is really unique to it. We should probably be spending more effort dismantling hate groups and such, though. And maybe building groups that aren’t centered on hate and xenophobia.
Excellently written, and I agree deeply with the conclusion. Sometimes certain major religions make me so mad that it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, but I know what you say is correct, as I’ve read similar ideas on belief and its connection with social connections. Zizek for example has written a great deal on belief and how its important/shapes us/we all experience it.
Also, secondarily, I guess “Not All Religions.” Every religion is imperfect, but not all of them are rooted in fear of death and promises of eternal life. Hinduism and Buddhism for example are complex religions of their own that don’t come in the Abrahamic Religion Package.
However…
I agree with all of these, but how do we even address that the religions that do specifically have a problem are some of the most widely believed religions on the planet? I know we need to be dismantling hate groups, but how do we dismantle those ones, because I hate to say it, their history is where a large part of the cycle of abuse in human society comes from. These specific religions do teach things like Christianity’s “turn the other cheek” that demand submissiveness from their members. I really do think those major religions are the root of abusive behavior because it’s so ingrained in the religions and these religions have so much history. It literally impacts the majority of the world.
It’s really hard, because like… I know a fella in Jordan who, when he lived in the US, admitted to me he thought he might be atheist. Eventually, he went back home to Jordan. I think about when he said that, a lot. It’s literally a dangerous thing for him to admit in Jordan. It’s not like they will kill him or anything, but he could lose his job, certain types of property, be divorced from his wife by the state, be denied any and all inheritances, and custody of his children. That’s the government saying to all the citizens of Jordan that they’ll try to ruin your life if you admit atheism. What a way to kill all doubt in a believers mind, eh?
I appreciate this perspective, but it feels like not even treading water when we’re talking about dismantling hate groups, as if some religious institutions aren’t purpose-built to facilitate becoming hate groups.
Thank you for the kind words.
I unfortunately do not have any easy answers, nor unusual power to enact my will on the larger world.
However, if I was a billionaire, I would consider trying to build up the religious Left. Bear with me.
People aren’t going to abandon religion overnight. Religion does a lot of things for people. It provides community. Answers. Rituals. Charity. You can’t just rip that out. But I bet you could shape it.
The end goal would be something like the Unitarian Universalists. If you’re unfamiliar (and hopefully my knowledge isn’t too out of date), they’re a religion without a creed or dogma beyond “respect the inherent worth and dignity of other humans.” Members are encouraged to explore different traditions and faiths.
It has a lot of the structure of traditional religion. There’s a place you can go to on sunday to sing songs and meet people. They have people who can give you answers. They do social work. Any given congregation can be shaped or flavored to its locale. It can have many trappings of christianity, or judaism, or whatever the members want. That can get people in the door. It can feel church-y.
When I was a kid in the 90s (I’m getting old), my parents started going to a unitarian church as a sort of compromise. One week they had someone from Lambda Legal give a talk. I think that was the first time I saw an openly adult gay man, and he was just a dude in a suit talking about legal stuff. Bam. Normalized.
Anyway. Back to the billionaire fantasy. My plan would be to try to build more communities like that. They don’t have very specific dogmas, they don’t have to have a position on the supernatural, but they do provide community and many other parts of religion. The long term plan would be to shift the perspective on religion from “hey maybe this is true” to “this is the mythology people believed, and these were their rituals. We can participate in them to feel connected to our heritage, but we don’t have to be literal about it”.
This is by no means a fully thought through idea, and I don’t have the money or clout to make it happen. But that’s what I would try. It would leverage the group membership thing by making people feel like they’re shifting from one religion to another instead of just BAM GIVE UP YOUR TRADITIONS. But it would take decades, possibly centuries, of work to make a dent. Catholicism, for example, is huge, wealthy, and organized. It’s not going away in our life time.
So, it turns out you don’t have to be a billionaire to make things happen. I can think of two ways a bunch of people on Lemmy can make a movement like this happen.
Approach 1: Create a non-profit/charity
This will have to start very small, be funded through donations, and slowly grow by helping people in various ways, causing more people to join and expand. Like you mentioned, it will take a very long time to make a dent in Catholicism.
Approach 2: Get corporate America behind this
This is a lot easier than people think - we just need to figure out how do monetize this. Given how many private jets and other extravagances Christian evangelicals have, I suspect there could be enough money in religion - we’d have to discuss and work out how to get enough $$$ to make it worth their while without having hate as a core tenet of our religion.
This approach could have the advantage of multi-million dollar advertising budgets, lobbyists, and many other resources to have a much faster impact than the other approach.
Let me know if you’re up for discussing and fleshing out the details. I think it could be a fun exercise, and it might even lead somewhere in the future - I personally have a few contacts in high places in corporate America that will always listen to new business pitches 😉
You are correct that work can be done without being a billionaire. However, to accomplish much I imagine it would have to become a full time job, at least for some people. Most of us can’t leave our jobs. And if it was going to be a part time endeavor, we might get more results joining an organization that already exists.
I haven’t kept up with the unitarians, but using them as an example you could probably work with them to accomplish some of these goals. You wouldn’t have to build everything from scratch. But you’d have to deal with the existing brand and legacy, so that’s a mixed bag.
Also, I would be hesitant to get too in bed with corporate interests. That could easily lead to enshittification, corruption of ideals, or just losing people because it feels corporate instead of spiritual. But I’m not experienced in running this sort of thing, so this is mostly guessing.
That’s great! I know a much better way to change the minds of hateful fascists, though!
It works permanently and goes at about 762 meters per second.
For a second I thought you were describing your fist and I was like what kind of mutant is this??
More seriously, while that has merits I think there’s also merit in addressing the top of the funnel. We should also be considering ways of reaching people earlier, before they’re in a spot where fascism appeals.