Anywho, this subject has always been part of my relationship with myhusband. When we met he was a Protestent and I was a very, very active Mormon. At the time, getting married in the Temple was like, the mostimportant thing ever, and I simply could not get serious with someone who couldn’t reach that goal. I mean, we were talking about our immortal souls. So, he went to the missionary discussions and got baptized. You’d think that would make me happy, no? Well, it didn’t, because that’s about the same time I began to question my religious beliefs.
So, he’s a Mormon and so am I…only at one point, I decide I don’t believe in God. So, after about a few years of struggling with it, I finally couldn’t take it anymore and made my husband talk to me about his beliefs, because at that point I had reached a pretty definite decision.
He admitted he was an agnostic, and I swear it was the best news I’ve ever received. Why? Because since I’ve become an atheist, I find it very, very hard to respect religious people. I know this might get me flamed, and I’m not going to further go in to it, but I really can’t take religion seriously, and as a result, I can’t take followers that seriously either. So if my husband still believed in God, It would be a major struggle for me, because I love him dearly, but I would be very skeptical (and probably very vocal) about his faith. And that’s not a recipe for a successful marriage.
Another face-saving, argument avoidance attempt. Tiresome.
No skin off my back, but I have to point out that you have said very little, and almost nothing applicable to the argument or valid in the context of this discussion–as was pointed out and demonstrated at least twice so far, your wishful posts to the contrary notwithstanding. You have made one inapplicable objection based on the fictional sanctity of projection of unsupported opinion based on deep personal conviction. I address it, and you conveniently ignore whatever I write and instead resort to attempts–I stress the word “attempts”–at humorous denigration intended to suggest your superiority. Your kind of “debating” needs no further comment.
Lilairen, this seems like another endorsement of what is, effectively, ignorance. Point the first, we are under no obligation to consider people’s self-knowledge as a basis. Intent is not necessarily the issue here, rather the conditions that result in the application of selective bias per religion are considered. You are saying, like Sacrilegium, that because of unsubstantiated opinions a subject may hold, the subject’s beliefs and actions are justified. They are only justified in his/her subjective frame of reference and I do not hold otherwise (indeed, I am getting tired of repeating this point). However, one would think that the idea of a bigger, more consistent world outside of people’s personal opinions would come to mind, particularly given the nature of this forum. “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”, as Aldous Huxley put it.
Point the second, the demonstrable effects of inter-personal selective religious bias are not the same as what any of six billion people are thinking, yet you seem to be lumping the two together. What people think is often confused, rooted in ignorance and opinion, and hard to untangle. What people do, on the other hand, is a more convenient topic, case in point selective religious bias (for whatever motivations, privately justified or not, well-meaning even).
Point the third, you haven’t addressed the arguments I provided so far, instead you have provided what appears to be an “everyone is right” type of defence similar to Sacrilegium’s non-point. I reject its relevance and applicability in the face of concrete and consistent knowledge (and as far as the discussion is concerned I don’t give two figs if the people involved choose to acknowledge that their belief is unsubstantiated).
Point the fourth, I do not deny exhibiting a degree of arrogance in this discussion, indeed, one would have to be obtuse to assert that I have approached this question without any arrogance. I do think though that you and one or two others are exaggerating my arrogance quite significantly. The difference, I pointed out, is making use of verifiable facts available (I could turn around 180 degrees should other facts become available, and still employ a degree of rhetorical arrogance), and conviction based on purely personal processes. For example, some people are religious because being religious reassures and comforts them in a number of ways, and long-term faith is built brick by brick out of this positive reinforcement. While fascinating and worthy of study, this rationalization hardly extends to the world outside the person’s head, and is by and large an arbitrary personal judgment not based on concrete historical or theistic (or whatever) knowledge, but on highly personal responses to belief and the subject matter. Another person’s response, on the other hand, might be quite negative; it may be based on a person’s previous experience with systems of belief, on their independence, or on reluctance to acknowledge/submit to a superior being, and so forth. While all these reasons are fascinating, what is the end result when these personal arbitrary (in the physical world) values are projected on to others?
Selective bias and the rest of that.
What “realities” in people’s heads? You mean, of course, unsubstantiated but fiercely held opinion? In that case, going back to cmkeller’s point, how would you go about debating with a holocaust denier who is absolutely convinced that the Holocaust never happened (unsubstantiated belief), and who uses that as a launching base for anti-Jewish sentiments (bigotry)? With your approach of “realities inside heads”, you would have precious little to say to him, because according to you there is no validating external structure (there IS–it’s called the real world). We’re fighting ignorance in a forum for intellectual debate around here, we’re not accepting with complacence whatever comes our way.
It’s not all relative.
Pepperlandgirl, interestingly this comes back full circle to an earlier point. I need to point out that if your husband still believed in God the problem would be intolerance and insufficient respect between the two of you, not necessarily your beliefs themselves (intolerance would engender the friction between you, but with more tolerance, differing beliefs could be no or less of a problem). I think this is the third time an atheist in this thread states they have trouble respecting anyone who is religious. Surely, as I pointed out earlier, this is exactly the same mechanism found among those faithful who take a similar dim view of non-theists, or those not within their own specific faith (without implying that all theists and atheists behave in the same manner).
If you are willing to post more on this can you analyse why you experience this response? There can be any number of reasons (I mentioned a few in an earlier post) but identifying the main one would be useful. Is it because you expect your husband to conform to the same standards you hold? Does the concept of the ideological clone have relevance, as it does for some others? Would you feel threatened if someone so important to you happened to have radically different beliefs? Going from Mormon to atheist is one of the most extreme swings I can imagine: is it possible that your change was a backlash against Mormonism, a rejection of every church ideology based on unhappiness, dissatisfaction, disillusionment, etc.?
You have described intolerance, essentially, which could constitute bigotry should your position turn out to be unreasonable. One of my earlier arguments was that (willy-nilly, realizing it or not) it is not reasonable to base judgments of people on unsubstantiated opinion (such as beliefs in the existence or non-existence of divinity) and to select against persons on such tenuous bases. This being (I hesitate to say it again) quite irrespective of what the selectors actually believe, and whether they think they are doing the right thing, etc.
The reality in my head is that I’m attracted to the people I’m attracted to, and make a life with those people I want to make a life with, and your opinions about whether or not I’m making those decisions in a grounded way or not are completely and utterly irrelevant.
Why are you so interested in imposing your subjective beliefs (and yes, your beliefs about how other people should behave in their relationship choices are subjective, not objective as you keep falsely and foolishly claiming) on other people’s private lives?
People make their choices on the basis of what’s important to them. Your claims that what’s important to them is not actually important are not only unfounded, but false.
Bluntly: you don’t get to tell other people what’s actually important to them.
Further bluntly: your attempt to drag irrelevances into the argument makes you look foolish. If you want me to consider your claims about Holocaust deniers in the slightest bit relevant to this discussion, you are first going to have to demonstrate both that attraction is objective and that there are objective criteria for forming a partnership.
Marriage is only justified in a subjective frame of reference. Live with it.
I disagree (big surprise there). Beliefs are not “simply another opinion.” My bringing up the issue of holocaust deniers or moon-landing deniers was an attempt at making that distinction, but my point seems to have gotten lost. Therefore, I will attempt to re-iterate it in a more clear manner.
There are not merely two levels of factuality, as you seem to be saying - provable fact, and all else is mere opinion. I’d say there are three levels:
Demonstrable fact. Scientific principles would fall into this category (e.g., objects on Earth will always fall at a rate of 32 feet per sec. per sec.). Since the truth of the statement can be immediately measured by on-command demonstration, this is a level of certainty a statement about which we’d both agree can be made without being accused of arrogance.
Subjective opinion. Tastes or future expectations or what-ifs would fall into this category (e.g., Titanic was the greatest movie of the 1990s, Gore would have made a better president than Bush is). There is no method of proof that could ever be applied to such a statement, because the elements of that statement originate completely with the subject making the statement. This is a level of certainly, a statement about which we’d both agree would make the avower subject to accusations of arrogance.
Now, where do we disagree? at level 2:
Historical assertion. The truth of a historical assertion cannot be proven by demonstration, because proving that something can happen or could have happened does not prove that it did happen at X time in X place. On the other hand, it does not fall into level 3 either, because its truth is not fully in the mind of the person making the statement - either the even did occur or it didn’t. We “prove” historical assertions through two methods: testimony and artifact analysis. Some will find the “proof” that exists convincing. Others will not, and find alternate explanations for the evidence (witnesses lying/mistaken, non-first-hand testimony unreliable due to transmission errors, artifacts forged, etc.). And make no mistake - religion (or at least the well-known organized religions) does fall into this category. Without the historical assertions made by the religion, the rationale behind it vanishes entirely - for Judaism, the revealation at Sinai, for Christianity, JC’s birth as an aspect of G-d, for Islam, Gabriel’s revealations to Mohammed, for Buddhism, the Buddha’s achievement of enlightenment, etc. What one believes about a religion is tied to what one believes about the historical assertions it makes.
Here, Abe, is where we disagree. You would consign Historical Assertion to the same level as Subjective Opinion because different people require different . I disagree. The fact that there is concrete reason to believe makes this more than mere opinion to the believer. The fact that someone else chooses not to believe need not concern the believer.
Now, where does the arrogance issue play into things? When dealing with someone who chooses not to believe the evidence that he himself does believe, it would undoubtedly be off-putting to recommend behaviors based on a premise the person believes to be false. With someone that the believer is not close to, polite relations may very well be more important than promotion of their welfare. However, in a loving relationship - e.g., a marriage - nothing should be more important to either party than the other party’s welfare. And if it has been proven to the satisfaction of one party that a certain way of life is the best way for people to live, then to not promote that is, in my opinion, not an act of love. Politeness, perhaps, but love should mean more than that.
And to not seek a love relationship where an essential portion of that concern for partner’s welfare will have to be suppressed in order to maintain polite cohabitation - that, Abe, is not bigotry or intolerance.
Well I’m afraid I have little time for this endorsement of blissful ignorance and unawareness, especially considering the abundant responses to your objections that you will find in the previous posts, should you read them.
That’s actually a problem with your defensive attitude. I am questioning certain behaviour. I couldn’t care less what you do or don’t do, but post something here, and it WILL be analysed and questioned by whoever feels like it. Clear? Or do you think that your assertions about what I can and can’t do are magically entitled to immunity, even when they are unsupported by anything other than emotional response?
The first sentence makes a point I never challenged–I merely pointed out that in the scheme of things, certain behaviour may be detrimental and/or superfluous, etc. The second sentence is empty and irrelevant assertion, decorative no doubt–I hope it cheers you up. But it really has nothing to do with what I am discussing.
I didn’t. If you think I did, your bristling spines have probably obstructed your vision. What I have done is question the importance of certain items as, in fact, relevant. Person X says religion is important to me in a mate because XYZ. I then challenge XYZ. You’re against the objections I bring to bear against XYZ? Then you are the one telling me what to do.
I am not the one who brought up the Holocaust denial example; I simply responded to it and used it as an illustration. The objection about requiring to demonstrate objectivity in personal attraction is a strawman so large you could bring to a certain desert festival. It simply is not relevant, because I claimed in no way that personal attraction is an objective matter. Now, would you like to post counter-arguments, rather than self-serving, illogical rants about it being your head and you do what you want? I went to some trouble to respond to you seriously, perhaps you would be decent enough to do the same. Or, if you’ll be providing the kind of “arguments” you’ve given us so far, you could just spare us.
Here’s a few points to consider: what kinds of discrimination constitute bigotry? Does bigotry require bad intentions? Need it be a conscious effort? Seems to me bigotry can be completely incidental and unintentional, and may even arise from a combination of good intentions and faulty information. Bigotry is also all about personal opinion, that which you seem to think is so magically inviolable. If it offends you when I submit that there may be elements of bigotry in the behaviour of some of the people who consider religion to be the most important factor in the selection of a mate, that’s your problem, not mine.
CMK: interesting points, I will address them as soon as time permits.
If someone believes that forming a partnership with someone not of their faith will cause them difficulties that they do not want to deal with, that is /their/ decision to make. And whether or not other people think it’s bigotry is completely irrelevant to their decision, and the legitimacy of their decision.
The reasons people develop attractions, fall in love, and make commitments are entirely within their own heads. You can make all the grand, sweeping statements about how wrongheaded the things in their heads are, and how those things should be held to some different standard, but no amount of believing good and right is on your side obligates anyone to listen – or, in fact, making it likely that anyone will.
If people want to make decisions that may be rooted in bigotry in their private lives, that’s entirely their business. They are not under any obligation to form a relationship with people that they do not want to form a relationship with.
Whether or not you or I or anyone else would make those same decisions is flatly not relevant. They are entirely legitimate decisions to make, supporting the lives and lifestyles that those people want to live. You say, "Person X says religion is important to me in a mate because XYZ. I then challenge XYZ. You’re against the objections I bring to bear against XYZ? Then you are the one telling me what to do. " No. I’m telling you that your objections to XYZ are not relevant to me. You can tell me about your complaints about XYZ all you like, but I am under no obligation to care, or consider your objections legitimate.
You have said, some number of posts back, that you believe that religious belief is inherently personal, and thus, apparently, that you cannot see it making sense to include it as a criterion for partnering. You also suggested, if I’m reading you correctly, that in the absence of objective evidence for a god or gods, the question should not come up.
Personally, my criteria for partnership include a certain amount of sharing of beliefs at a personal level. This is, as I mentioned before, not something that means I do not partner with people who do not share my label, but it does exhibit a significant pressure on my process of attraction. To suggest that I form a bond with someone whose philosophy I find incompatible with my own on the basis that these are just private opinions is to suggest that my attractions should be, on some externally imposed moral scale, subject to some objective scale. I find that non-secular practitioners of a faith – any faith – have the principles they follow permeating their lives to one extent or another, and if their principles are not compatible with mine, neither will our lives be.
You seem to be of the opinion that this is a wrongheaded set of criteria for forming a partnership, and that I should be open to forming relationships with people whose life-principles and mine are in conflict. I am of the opinion that if I’m picking people to live with for the next several decades, I get to pick what sort of strife I’ll accept under my roof.
I agree with you that a person’s principles should be in sync with his or her partner’s. However, these principles can be matched without matching religions. Living a loving, honest, fair life (and even honoring god) can be the goal of two individuals who worship in different churches or synogogues. I guess I’m saying that the end result of your faith (or lack thereof) is what is attractive to your mate – not the path that got you there. Yes, I suppose it could be nice to share the same traditions as your mate, but it doesn’t change the “person” you fell in love with.
I repeat: “This is, as I mentioned before, not something that means I do not partner with people who do not share my label”.
And repeat note from my first post on this thread that my family includes representatives of Christianity, paganism, and agnosticism, and that the person whose actual beliefs are most similar to my own does not share a label with me.
It’s not so much that I expect him to agree with me. For example, my sisters and my mother are still very religious. But religion is not a problem at all in our relationship, it never comes up, and I don’t think any less of them. Of course, it helps that they don’t know I’m an atheist. My in-laws are also Christian and are very faithful and I see it makes them happy and we never discuss it. I have absolutely nothing against the Mormon faith, and I didn’t become an atheist due to dissatisfaction, anger, or bad experiences. I simply realized that I cannot believe in God. I tried, but I just can’t do it. I’m too skeptical to just accept it, and there is not enough proof for me. If I were to believe in God again, however, I would return to the LDS Church happily. I like their belief system, and culturally, I still am Mormon.
But I have to keep the fact that i am an atheist hidden from the people in my life. I would never, ever tell any member of my family, for any reason. I couldn’t tell anybody I knew growing up, I couldn’t tell anybody in my community (must remember, I grew up in Utah.)
Part of the reason it took so long for me to finally decide I was an atheist was because I was very scared and uncomfortable. I don’t know how anybody else felt during the deconversion process, but it was terrifying for me.
But my husband was a safe haven for me. Because he was an agnostic himself (he nevre told me until recently but I strongly, strongly suspected it), he was able to listen to me when I needed to vent and let me know that what i was going through was OK. I need to hide myself from my family and everybody I grew up with. If he was still religious (Mormon or otherwise) I would definitely feel the same pressure. I wouldn’t be comfortable around him, because whether it was true or not, I would feel that he was judging me.
Also, I’m very critical of religion. I can only be critical in the privacy ofmy own home and on the Internet. But if my husband was religious, I wouldn’t be able to criticize at all. Why? Because I wouldn’t want to hurt him or make him uncomfortable. so then I would have to sit on everything, never speak my mind, etc and eventually I would grow to resent him for it. If, on the other hand, I said whatever I wanted (like I do now) and he believed in God, then he might grow to resent me over it.
The belief system doens’t matter…its what happens as an effect of the belief system. I can’t be with someone who makes me uncomfortable and I would sooner cut off my own foot than purposely cause him to be hurt or uncomfortable. I would love him no matter what, I fell in love with him before I became an atheist and before I knew what he believed. And I would never leave him over something like religion, but I fear that if he were to be a believer in God, it would cause stress and tension in our relationship…a relationship that is right now relatively stress and tension free.
I don’t know if I’mexplaining this well because it’s late and I’m very tired.
I tried to put this a different way a few days ago, but it didn’t come out exactly right. So I’ll try again:
For some religions, people’s actions are as important as their beliefs. For example, I am Jewish. In traditional Judaism, the wife lights the candles on Friday night. In order for ME to be fully Jewish, SHE has to perform a certain action.
Now, I obviously don’t want to force anyone to do something she doesn’t want to do. So I would have to marry someone who would light the candles of her own volition. Chances are that anyone who would do so would either be Jewish herself, or totally non-religious. I can’t imagine a devout Baptist, say, lighting Shabbos candles.
Judaism is a particularly tricky one because there are hundreds of actions – not beliefs, but actions – that must be done correctly to fully participate in the religion.
Back again briefly, before I respond to anyone else I wanted to address some points by cmkeller.
We are, I see from your last post, looking at the problem of fact versus opinion in religion (being one of the fulcra of the current argument) in quite a similar manner, although I find myself disagreeing somewhat with certain elements of your epistemic breakdown.
No major disagreement there, except that I would remove the word “immediately”. Verification of a claim is not necessarily constrained to immediate observation of an event. For example, palaeontology, palaeoanthropology, cosmology, geology, are all examples of disciplines where it is impossible to “observe-verifiy” on the spot or on command, as it were. Nonetheless, we know innumerable facts about all these branches of inquiry because they employ methods that allow us to obtain verifiable information based on the collection of “old” evidence–we know when life developed on the Earth, the approximate age of the Universe, the processes of rock formation, the descent of primates from earlier forms of life, etc. History and archaeology also are fields of study that operate on extended timelines and “old” evidence.
Fundamentally I agree here, but I want to clarify the difference between purely subjective standards and more objective standards. Let’s say that I enjoyed the movie Titanic, to use your example. Although in today’s pop world just saying “I liked so and so” seems enough discussion to satisfy most people, qualitative analysis does go much deeper than that. The question is what standards, if any, are we using? If someone liked Titanic for purely subjective reasons, i.e., an infatuation with one of the leading actors, we will probably not respect said person’s judgment of Titanic quite as much as a person who offers a rather more relevant opinion of the material, i.e. taking into consideration the actors’ performances, mise en scene, use of colour, special effects, camera-work, lighting, sound, musical score, pacing, etc., including of course the script itself (another can of worms!). There are standards, it’s just that not everyone makes use of them. So, saying Titanic was great because Leonardo DiCaprio is so cute (a popular example) is an argument that is entirely subjective and quite meaningless to anyone else unless they too are infatuated with DiCaprio; saying that Titanic was great as a result of [list reasons according to valid frame of reference] seems to me a stronger position because, while it is still a subjective response to the material (we’re only human), it is framed and modulated by objective standards that are applicable to more than just one person out of 6 billion.
I make a distinction between unsupported opinion, and supported opinion. Apologies if this was unclear thus far, but it required clarification in point 3. I feel this distinction is necessary because of the old problem of absolute truth–in essence, even the most “true” of statements we can think of is simply a very well supported hypothesis, or opinion for that matter. The nature of human knowledge (specifically science) is such that knowledge is never final, only highly probable.
Actually, on this point we agree almost entirely! The problem is that the standards of evidence used to establish the veracity of an assertion can often be quite poor. It doesn’t matter if someone finds personal justifications for believing; what matters is the facts themselves.
For example, when a supposedly ancient Greek amphora was unearthed in Brazil a few years ago, some people used this evidence to support the claim that “white” man (the ancient Greeks) had discovered the Americas before anyone else, particularly before the natives that Europeans encountered on their first forays to the Americas. People who drew such conclusions (or, at any rate, tried to convince others of them) were employing exceedingly poor standards of evidence in support of their claims, because they didn’t check whether the amphora (a hoax) was genuine (not to mention that their real agenda was demonstrating that white man had first right to the New World).
More recently, an ossuary surfaced that has been linked to Jesus Christ by some people doing some calculations that could stand to be questioned. The matter of whether this constitutes **acceptable evidence **for Jesus is being discussed in this current thread. The answer is being worked out based entirely on the standards of evidence and methodology employed.
Here I disagree. Religious texts such as the Bible or the Koran may certainly contain items of history in them, but they are not recorded works of history; they are primarily myths. And it is not wise to take a myth and look at it as if it were fact, because there is no evidence that myth is fact for any religion. For example, we know Mohammed was a real historical person, and we can trace and reconstruct events in his life with quite a good level of confidence and support from a number of sources. But we have no reliable evidence that Mohammed had the holy text of the Koran revealed to him in a cave by the archangel Gabriel, as the myth goes.
The issue is the confusion between that which we actually know based on the information we have (i.e. we know Mohammed existed) and that which we accept because it’s written in some book or it’s part of some doctrine, but is not actually supported by the evidence (i.e. Mohammed received textual knowledge of the Koran from Gabriel).
So there is a big difference between that which we know based on fair examination of the best evidence available, and that which we think we know but is prompted by desire, doctrine, misinformation, etc. (not based on the best evidence available).
No, that’s not quite my position. I do consign some historical assertions to the same level as subjective unsupported opinion, but only when standards of evidence for supporting the assertion are not properly met. For example, saying that Mohammed did as a matter of historical fact receive the Koran from Gabriel in a cave is an item of opinion, because there is no evidence that this actually happened. A believer chooses to believe such a thing, and that is purely his or her business, an item of faith (belief). But whether he/she believes it, that still doesn’t change the fact that there is no evidence available to suggest that Mohammed was actually infused with the Koran by Gabriel, and the claim is therefore unsupported. The obvious objection to this point is, “it says so in the Koran, surely that is evidence”, yet that brings us back to the differences between myth and history. Belief, whatever one’s standards may be, remains an item of personal choice. There is practically nothing we know of in the world or its history that clearly indicates the existence of divinity, yet you will hear an incredible spectrum of claims to the contrary.
I’m not sure what this means, because there is no concrete evidence to believe that I am aware of (there are many claims and opinions to the contrary, but hey, claims and opinions are a dime a dozen). Therefore the choice to believe remains properly a personal one, an entirely subjective one.
You make a good point, yet it is based on “the best way for people to live”. What is this best way? How do we know it’s the best way, and not simply a passable way and that a better way exists? And is it best for party A or party B, or both? There seems to be an element of compromise involved here. The projection of personal beliefs in a wider radius than they can possibly support, I mean.
I’m not suggesting beliefs ought to be suppressed for the sake of marriage! I’m suggesting that beliefs are, whether we recognize it or not, a personal and completely subjective matter that, apart from the believer’s behaviour itself, has zero bearing on the world. For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t matter what importance is assigned to a belief; yet it seems relevant that an unsupported belief ought to manifest itself in the real world by imposing a selection process where only a holder of a like belief is chosen as suitable. Why should it be so?
The degree of arrogance involved is the conviction that “it” is THE correct thing to do, this based on personal opinion rather than concrete information. The bigotry involved is discrimination on religious grounds that are unreasonable, since belief is, well, belief, not fact. Belief is just another opinion, although many people consign to (their) belief far more importance than they do to other opinions or even facts of the real world.
Responses to the other posters will have to wait a bit until I have some more time, but hopefully the above has explained the position I took on this matter.
Sorry, Abe, but this is exactly the problem I was trying to address with you. They are not recorded works of history that you believe, but they are recorded works of history. They are not unsupported opinions/beliefs, they are supported by evidence that you find unconvincing.
If you were to put Mohammed on the witness stand during a trial, what he says would be testimony. It would be evidence. As a juror, you could choose not to believe what he says, but it is still evidence that must be accepted or rejected. What he wrote and what he told other people are historical assertions. If you choose not to believe the evidence - which, I’ll grant, consists entirely of the testimony of Mohammed - that is your choice, but it is wrong to dismiss the belief of those who believe in it as merely opinion.
Now, if one believes that testimony - that evidence - then one believes that Mohammed actually heard the word of the Creator of the Universe prescribe a certain way of life as maximally beneficial for a human being. Not because it is that person’s own opinion, but because he finds the testimony of Mohammed that the All-Powerful and All-Knowing G-d said so to be compelling enough evidence.
Throughout your most recent post, you use phrases such as “but only when standards of evidence for supporting the assertion are not properly met”, “the standards of evidence used to establish the veracity of an assertion can often be quite poor”, “based on fair examination of the best evidence available”, and “we have no reliable evidence” without regard to the fact that the standards, fairness of examination, and reliability of evidence you refer to are your own standards. Others do not require as much proof before they are convinced. To them, they are genuinely convinced that this historical assertion is true, and therefore that G-d has stated that X is the best way for a person - any person to act.
What it boils down to is: Testimony is evidence, too. You can choose not to believe the testimony, Abe, but you cannot deny that said testimony exists. And thus, the assertion in question is not one that is entirely unsupported.
There are other points in your post with which I disagree, but this is the one that is at the core of our discussion of the question in the OP, so I am limiting myself to addressing it rather than adding tangents.
Only because I try to use as objective a set of standards as I possibly can. Of course those employing less stringent standards (and, more so, those who want to believe) will reach a different conclusion. But, as I keep saying, conviction alone still doesn’t assign more validity to a particular claim over another.
Note that there is a clear difference between works of history and works of mythology. As I said some posts back, there is no doubt that works of mythology may contain historical information, but it is a grave mistake to take a work of mythology as fact. The reason for that lies in the meaning of the word “myth”. Myths deal with supernatural beings or events and serve as fundamental types in the worldview of a people: they explain aspects of the natural world or delineating the psychology, customs, or ideals of society. Myths are incredibly valuable from any point of view, but reliable historical record they are not because they lack sufficient corroboration. If myths were historical record, they almost certainly wouldn’t be called myths.
If we had Mohammed and could ask him such questions, we would get to the bottom of the thing, based on his testimony as you say. As it stands, the testimony we have is obviously insufficient, and it’s completely irrelevant who believes or doesn’t. Mohammed, to continue with this example, revealed the text of the Koran over a period of about 23 years, and was said to be illiterate. Right there we have two major items we can use in our questioning of the Prophet, to establish whether the Koran was revealed to him as the myth goes, or whether (as has been suggested) Mohammed suffered from an epilepsy-like disorder and constructed the Koran using a combination of Judeo-Christian texts (and the Koran has sections that are very similar to corresponding texts in Christianity and Judaism). There is more evidence to take into consideration than just whether someone finds such testimony personally convincing. Evaluation by subjective standards is bound to result in error, which is why fields of study eschew the subjective and set up objective frames of reference (or, I should say, frames of reference that are as objective as possible)
It’s not all relative.
It is opinion, the main difference is what relevance you assign to it. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s still opinion and always will be until something in the way of solid support for this opinion emerges, something that meets more than merely the subjective partisan standards of evidence. Whether this new evidence will be in the form of confirmed miracles, or the discovery of a creche of ancient texts for scholars to study, or whatever else, religious beliefs are and remain opinion. Belief and opinion, you can even see how similar the two words are.
Same goes for believing ANYTHING though, including utter rubbish like Scientology. Your statement above is not an argument, it’s a position. Someone wants to believe, fine by me. Someone wants to bring their belief out on to the physical world (in whatever form) then somewhat better standards of evidence than personal conviction are required.
I went over this posts ago. It doesn’t matter what someone elmploying highly subjective standards believes. And I’m not using my own standards, I am simply applying objective standards from most other disciplines to a field of study where the use of such standards is sometimes resisted because people want to believe whatever makes them feel good, or whatever they think ought to be “right”.
Testimony may be reliable or unreliable. Testimony may be tampered with before it reaches us (see the whole Bible debacle, or the Hadith). Testimony may be completely at variance with other, better supported testimony. And so on. If by “support for a position” you include anything we can grab on to believe something, then I agree with you that there is support. Otherwise one has to face the fact that mythology is only rarely reliable testimony, and then generally in segments, not as a whole. The other way lies literalism, which is really another word for wilful ignorance.
I knew you were going to say something like this. Unfortunately, you seem to think that only “those who want to believe” are apt to devise standards of evidence to suit their personal desires. That is not true. The same can be said of “those who want to not believe.” Just to give a relatively neutral example (i.e., one that I assume applies personally to neither of us), a Holocaust denier has a more stringent standard for evidence (of the Holocaust, at least) than most people would think is “objective,” because they want to not believe.
There can be no absolute objectivity - either from believers or from skeptics - when evaluating evidence for historical assertions. Only statements whose truth can be immediately demonstrated can be said to be objective.
“Sufficient” is in the eye of the beholder.
Depends who’s doing the naming, doesn’t it?
But we don’t have him. Nor do we have anyone who is no longer alive. It is to an equal degree that we don’t have John Lennon or John Adams or John the Baptist. What we have as testimony to any event of their lives is what they either recorded in writing or what they told other people, who, depending on how far in the past these people lived, told others, etc.
(second verse, same as the first!) Insufficient to you. Not so obvious or insufficient to others.
Again…why are their standards of evidence necessarily more “subjective and partisan” than yours? Yes, you say you’re as objective as possible. But the others would say that as well.
So their personal convictions that accept Mohammed’s testimony are “worse” than your personal convictions that reject it. Of course.
OK, at least now we know where you get your standards from. Nonetheless, those standards are still a) subject to subjective distortion, and b) your choice to employ those, which, while they are applied to a number of scholarly disciplines, are not the only ones applied in life situations - courts of law being only the most obvious example.
Just as easily as - or even more easily than- you assign to believers an ulterior motive of “making themselves feel good” I could assign to non-believers ulterior motives of wanting to indulge in physical pleasures forbidden by the various religions they disbelieve or a desire for non-accountability to any authority that they cannot themselves control. The blade cuts both ways.
That’s all true. And it is certainly one’s prerogative to dismiss testimony as untrue for any number of reasons. However, you must bear in mind that just as the believer’s acceptance of certain testimony may lead to his accepting as true that which is not, similarly, the non-believer’s rejection of it may lead to his accepting as untrue that which is. To re-hash an earlier example, the Holocaust deniers flat-out reject the testimony of those who actually have their Auschwitz serial numbers tatooed on their arm. I’m not saying that rejection of certain religious tesimony is on a par with that. However, despite the difference in degree, the principle is the same that the possibility of error exists as much in rejection as in acceptance.
Thank you. And with this, said beliefs step out of the realm of “pure opinion.”
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Otherwise one has to face the fact that mythology is only rarely reliable testimony, and then generally in segments, not as a whole.
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This employs a circular definition of mythology. Mythology is defined as that which is unreliable, and then you dismiss its reliability because it’s mythology.
Only if accepted uncritically, which is not always the case.
Chaim said, “Insufficient to you. Not so obvious or insufficient to others.”
This logic would seem to make Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy legitimate, “factual beings” because the lesser standards of 5-year-olds are “their” standards. I would be very surprised if you said you believed in either of these myths.
First of all, there are many “myths” or testimonies that I don’t believe - not just those which no one has ever spoken of as genuine fact (like Santa Claus), but also those which some people do state as fact (like Mohammed). Just because my criterium for selection is not as tight as Abe’s or yours does not mean that I’ll believe anything. I do have my own criterion, but unlike you and Abe, I’m not so quick to dismiss the beliefs of others as being complete opinion. I actually credit them for having some independent thought and seek to understand, in a non-condemnatory manner, the basis of difference between my beliefs and theirs.
But that obscures the point that I’d been trying to argue, which quite frankly can be easily re-stated re: Santa Claus. A five year old kid has been told by his parents that Santa brings presents to all children who do their homework. Because he believes his parents - not his own opinion, but his acceptance of the evidence that was offered to him - he tells everyone he genuinely cares about to make sure they do their homework, because he’d like to see them get presents. Is that arrogance? Is he expessing his opinion and imposing it on others?
Chaim said,
“A five year old kid has been told by his parents that Santa brings presents to all children who do their homework. Because he believes his parents - not his own opinion, but his acceptance of the evidence that was offered to him - he tells everyone he genuinely cares about to make sure they do their homework, because he’d like to see them get presents.”
Yes, but eventually, as the child matures, the evidence that was presented at the age of five is not enough. The child stops believing in the Santa Claus myth (even though they actually experienced the “brass ring” associated with the myth!).
A mother I know says, “Of course the Tooth Fairy is real. And I’m the Tooth Fairy. And so is any other parent who follows that tradition.” Myths are just like any other tool: there are situations to which they apply, and situations to which they do not. And those situations will vary not only depending on the external, visible parts of an interaction, but the internal lives of the participants.
One person may feel a need to only form a partnership with someone who can join them in the rituals and manifestations of a given faith freely and without restraint; another person may feel a need to only form a partnership with someone who shares certain attitudes and approaches to faith, whatever name they may give; a third person may wish only to form a partnership with someone who will respect their path; some other person may feel that those outside a certain course or set of ways are not suitable for partners or are subject to a differing fate; yet another person may consider the entire thing stupid and prejudicial. All of these are reasonable ways of interpreting even similar myths, and how a person chooses to do such a thing is their own private choice and from their own weightings.
These are the ways those people have decided to apply their separate tools, and I consider all of them legitimate means of applying the question of religion to the concern of forming a partnership. Some of those categories are full of people that I could not partner with; some contain people I could.
You’re missing the point. I’m not trying to argue for the truthfullness of Santa Claus, or for sticking to one’s beliefs when one no longer feels the evidence for it is compelling.
I’m trying to make the point that it is not “arrogant” to recommend behaviors to other people due to information one believes to be true. Abe (and perhaps you’ve been in agreement with him on this point) has called such a thing arrogant because the believer is promoting his opinions as fact. I am arguing that if the believer feels the evidence for his beliefs is compelling, it is more than mere opinion and he is not acting in an arrogant manner. Even if someone else might reject that very same evidence.