The suggestion itself isn’t arrogant, but the fact that you would give up an otherwise fulfilling relationship because of that belief, or a hard-core attempt to change someone’s mind, is. At least that’s what I think Abe is saying, and I’d have to agree.
A question then, for EchoKitty – I am interpreting this to suggest that if someone found that a failure to form a fulfilling relationship was grounded in lack of religious compatibility (at whatever level), then you would not find that arrogant? (I ask you specifically because I get the impression that Abe does not believe that such people exist, or if they do exist, that they are grounding this choice in “unfounded opinion”.)
I get the impression that some people in this discussion seem to be operating from the axiom that a relationship is fulfilling and satisfying except for some religious detail, and failing to consider that some people cannot have a fulfilling relationship without that religious detail included in the first place. (I’m vaguely reminded of the arguments I’ve seen from some bisexuals that there’s no good reason to reject an otherwise satisfying sexual/romantic relationship on the basis of the sex of the other person.)
I think I understand Chaim’s point, Abe.
I’m a Christian. David B is an atheist. If he began telling children about God, he would not be true to his own inner convictions. If I cease to state, where appropriate, on what my beliefs and behaviors rest, I would not be true to mine.
In both cases, we happen to be the sort of individual who will not attempt to force a belief system on someone else of an age to make his/her own decisions, but merely answer the questions of a small child in an age-appropriate manner and based on our own worldviews.
The fact that we are giving disparate answers is less significant than that we are behaving in a nearly identical manner – educating according to our own understanding of how the world works.
A thoroughgoing Humian would suggest that you can know nothing except your own perceptions. Where then is “objective reality”? I will grant that there is a fairly large data set on which all humanity is agreed: from the second law of thermodynamics to the absence of a living, rideable unicorn to Gresham’s Law, there are certain consensus issues that do constitute “objective reality.” But there is a wide variety of understandings of what underpins that reality and causes it to be what it is (including, of course, chance as the null set answering that “what” question).
Now, with regard to an adult relationship – what this thread originally set out to discuss, and what seems to be at issue in the last few posts – I think the question at hand is compatibility of worldview.
A person with a rigid mindset, whether that rigidity be accurate or not in the eyes of a third person, needs to find someone with an almost identical mindset. A person of more flexibility needs to find someone whose “degree of flexure” matches his/her own. My wife and I combine a strong personal faith with a great commitment to intellectual honesty. If either of us were, say, a His4Ever on the one hand or a happyheathen on another (and I mean no insult to either by using them as examples), we would be nowhere as compatible as a couple, because it is the closeness of our views, though hers is significantly more nature- and emotion-based than mine, that enables us to be what each other needs and feel what each other feels.
There are couples of significant flexibility on this board where one member is a “soft atheist” and the other a moderate believer. How they resolve the worldview issues, or if they even come up, is a question they will need to answer.
Lilairen said, "A question then, for EchoKitty – I am interpreting this to suggest that if someone found that a failure to form a fulfilling relationship was grounded in lack of religious compatibility (at whatever level), then you would not find that
arrogant? (I ask you specifically because I get the impression that Abe does not believe that such people exist, or if they do exist, that they are grounding this choice in “unfounded opinion”.) "
I don’t know if “arrogant” is really the word I’m looking for. Maybe “unnecessarily limited”, because regardless of your mate’s religious ideas, you can only experience religion in your own head. You’ll never know if it’s the same for your mate as it is for you.
Question for EchoKitty:
I’d agree that giving up an otherwise fufilling relationship because of a belief might be arrogant, and a hard-core attempt to change the other’s mind is arrogant. But suppose you’re not giving up an otherwise fufilling relationship because of your belief but rather, not starting a relationship that may or may not be fufilling. There’s a very big difference between divorcing your mate because he or she suddenly started or stopped believing in a religion, and not getting involved with a Lutheran man because you’re a devout Catholic who wants to marry a fellow Catholic. And I think the latter situation is far more common than the former.
To use a non-religious example, I never would have married the outdoorsy sort of man who wants to be camping, hiking or fishing as often as possible. Not because there’s anything wrong with such people, but I’m not one of them. Was it unnecessarily limited for me to eliminate such people as potential significant others? If he wants to be in the woods every weekend, and I never want to be in the woods, one of us is going to be unhappy every weekend or we’re going to spend a lot of time apart.
cmkeller unfortunately I really don’t have time to get into such deliberately confusionary discussions without at least tripling the length of my posts–and I think they’re quite long enough. You may equivocate everything with a moderate degree of success, but, as I keep repeating, reality is not all relative, at least not outside of a couple of philosophy books. That’s a discussion for high school theory of knowledge courses maybe, but using it here is a questionable tactic–you are essentially saying that we can’t know anything beyond our perceptions, so one view is as good as another. While we’re at it, you are a figment of my imagination, indeed, all of what we think is reality is actually the product of my brain, currently floating in a vat of nutrients. And yes, I’m making you think cogito, ergo sum right now in order to build up a consistent fictional world for my benefit.
One view is not necessarily as good as another. One covers such elementary objections to inquiry even in soft disciplines like the liberal arts, which is why I elaborated on an example from film earlier. Every generation of schoolkids, without fail, has to learn why Shakespeare is worthy of study. Only a few start out enjoying the intellectual exercise, and the most common objections are “Shakespeare is stupid” or “I don’t like it”. Personal conviction doesn’t take them far, no matter how strongly they may feel or phrase it.
Whether one likes it or not there are rigorous standards in almost every aspect of life. Accepting and advocating loose standards as you have argued seems an endorsement of wilful ignorance, as I mentioned before.
The only thing that saves your first sentence is the use of the word “absolute”; your second sentence is a falsehood, previously addressed (unless of course you mean “absolute” objectivity again, which we know is still beyond our grasp). You will note that I keep referring to being as objective as possible, not being completely and perfectly objective. Striving for objectivity is the one path to knowledge that has been demonstrated to work. Need I bring up again the problem of bias in historical methods and sources? It’s the first thing they teach on the subject, and we’re talking about middle school here.
There can be significant differences among people who want to believe, people who want the truth whatever it is, and people who want to disbelieve (these categories do not necessarily correspond to theists, agnostics, and atheists, but rather describe approaches to inquiry). As I keep saying, both “believers” and “disbelievers” will run into problems in the pursuit of truth because their bias influences their inquiries and their conclusions. Only the inquirer who tries to remain as objective, as detached, and as adherent to the methods of inquiry as possible has a chance of working at the truth and supporting his position using standards as objective as possible, and I think you know this perfectly well. Anyone who lets their desire to believe or disbelieve influence an investigation (such as accepting the ridiculously soft standards of evidence you keep referring to) will have a handicap when it comes to chipping away at the truth (best example I am aware of: young Earth creationists). And all they’ll have in support of their position is personal conviction and loosely collated facts, which, as I also keep repeating, is not good enough support for a position anywhere outside of the convinced’s head.
Arrogance does not require intent; as I mentioned earlier it could be purely unintentional. The Roman practice of non est actus reus nisi mens sit rea does not apply here, we are considering the effect of something, not the intent.
Perhaps arrogance isn’t the best word, I’m not sure on this. I don’t mean it as an insult, although the word is loaded to the gills. Rather, think back to Oedipus as told by Sophocles. Slaying his father and laying with his mother were bad enough, but the real problem came after that. Oedipus’s lowest moment came when, after he fathered four children with his mother Jocasta, Thebes was struck by a terrible plague, the result of a terrible sin. Oedipus proclaims that whosoever is responsible for this sin, be it even a member of his own family should be punished. Note that Oedipus didn’t consider for one moment that he might be guilty of the sin, although he was more than willing to accept his own family members as culprits (family was an all-important concept to the ancient Greeks, so this reaction is meaningful).
Oedipus was acting according to information that he honestly believed to be true.
The oracle at Delphi communicates that the sin is the murder of Laius, the previous ruler of Thebes, but the murderer remains unrevealed. The prophet Teiresias later explains to Oedipus’s brother-in-law Creon that the murderer is Oedipus himself, and that he is responsible for worse crimes. Oedipus refuses to believe Creon and would even have him put to death. After the death of Oedipus’s foster parents Jocasta understands the horrible truth and runs out to hang herself. A little later Oedipus also learns the truth, and rushes to find Jocasta dead, in effect losing both his mother and wife simultaneously. He takes the pins out of her dress and puts out his eyes.
Why his eyes? Because he had consistently refused to see the truth of the matter owing to his belief and self-righteousness. Because, in his arrogance (the presumtion his perceptions were right), he might as well have been blind. The message in most Greek myths is that hubris leads to nemesis–a poetic way the ancient fathers of epistemology had of stating that arrogance/presumption can have unpleasant consequences. If you strip away the myth and the gruesome subject, one of the points behind the tale of Oedipus is the same I’ve been arguing here for weeks, that projecting what is purely opinion as fact can be problematic. Faith is no doubt a good thing for some people, but not unless it’s suitably tempered by a degree of doubt. The inability of some people to even conceive of marrying a human being perfect in all ways other than religious flavour seems to me the same kind of arrogance.
If, that is, such a reaction is based on the conviction that one is correct and the other is wrong (which, I would argue, is the issue in many cases, not all of course).
pepperlandgirl, thanks for the insight into your situation a while back, I read it with interest.
Polycarp, on the whole I agree with your outline of the issue of compatibility of worldview, and I don’t think that is at variance with my posts here. I believe clairobscur made a slightly similar point in the beginning of the thread, although I had one or two objections to her argument. I think the behaviour patterns some people have expressed are not so much due to their views on religion/s, but to lack of flexibility when dealing with differring opinions on certain matters. Some of these matters, such as political or economic views, are demonstrable reflections of the real world we live in and affect us directly; other matters, such as religion, are purely matters of opinion or personal understanding, at least until “faith” is replaced with “knowledge” (and by knowledge I mean rather more than popular statements of faith such as “I know in my heart that God exists”).
From there lead the arguments I espoused previously. Note of course the difference between religion as a personal item and the politics of religion (which, although based on items of opinion, are factual and have demonstrable effects).
On the matter of educating children, things are more complicated. We relate any number of myths to children because myths are a beatifully simple way to illustrate the world and even prepare one for the world. Knowledge imparted to children must by necessity be simplified because children may not know or understand immediately what is meant by the second law of thermodynamics or Pascal’s wager. The world is broken up into good and evil, the child is encouraged to do good, and religion can be a valuable tool in aiding and explaining this task. But how do you approach the question of doubt with a child? How do you explain that there is not just one answer when children tend to naturally adopt an elementary dichotomic worldview? Instilling absolute faith or absolute disbelief into a child is, in my opinion, a great disservice, intellectually speaking. That’s not to say that imparting religious views (for or against) to a child is necessarily detrimental, but it certainly can be in some cases; the conscientious parent approaches the task with great care–as you seem to be saying, Polycarp.
Doreen,
I see where you draw the distinction between an existing relationship and a budding relationship. But suppose you work with a man (or belong to a club with a man) who you see regularly. You’ve learned that he is community-conscious. You know that he takes care of his ageing parents. He’s intelligent and kind. He pays his bills. He’s uproariously funny, handsome, and insightful. He’s not a bigot or a lout. In fact, you might be falling for him, and for some reason, you don’t yet know what his religion is. How could his religion (or lack of) possibly turn off your feelings for him because he worships in a different church? Wouldn’t you be doing yourself and him a disservice by not pursuing a relationship that is going to grow on Earth in the here and now? How could your god not want you to form a union with someone who is obviously a good man and who makes you happy?
You’re making the assumption that such a relationship could make the person happy, and that they simply want to marry someone who shares their religion because God commands it… (For the record, religion was not a requirement for me- my husband wasn’t Catholic when we got married). But the fact is, for some people, that would be enough to eliminate a happy relationship. Religion is a factor like any other. I wouldn’t have gotten involved with Mr Outdoors because I know that ultimately it would not work. I wouldn’t have gotten involved with someone whose job kept him away from home because I wouldn’t be happy with a husband who was only home on weekends. I wouldn’t have married a man who didn’t want children, because I did. And depending on the religion and the person’s practice of it, it might well be impossible to have a happy relationship with someone who doesn’t share it. For an extreme example, how happy a relationship is an Amish person going to have without a member of nearly any other religion? Either they use electricity, or not, have a phone or not, have services in their house or not and so on. Either way, one is not going to be happy. Why even entertain the possibility ?
I know someone who has the responsibility within marriage to produce children (this is a religious stricture, and I believe it also includes raising them within that particular faith structure). It is an objective fact that that responsibility exists within his faith, not a matter of subjective interpretation.
In his selection of people to marry, therefore, he has a certain obligation to marry someone who is both willing to have children and raise them within his faith. He could have chosen to do otherwise, but that would have been a choice to abandon that aspect of his faith, which matters a great deal to him.
To argue that he should not have been able to make that choice (he is, in fact, married to someone who shares his faith) is to hold that someone else’s standards should be more important to him than the requirements of his faith. I would say that that is a supreme form of arrogance: to presume that other people should conform to one’s own ideals in their private prioritizations.
The fact that my faith does not have such a requirement does not mean that I feel justified in feeling superior over those whose faith makes such demands of them; the fact that my personal attractions are not especially limited in terms of religious belief (though I readily acknowledge that they are, as (for example) I would not be interested in forming a relationship with someone who wished me to convert to theirs) does not mean that I cannot understand that other people have different desires for commonality than I do. The only standards I’m interested in meeting are my partners’ standards, and those people who find my priorities too narrow can rest assured in the confident knowledge that they will never be burdened by a relationship with me.