The Lion King
So, when someone is not religious and they break up with you, you can call them superficial or a bitch but when someone is religious and they break up with you, this is more of a problem because you should have expected them to be a flake? Why not just accept the possibility that the religious person could be a superficial bitch, too?
The Lion King. And I have to agree with you, pseudo.
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Sal,** to whom you’re responding here, has said he’s in a commited relationship with a religious person, so he obviously has no problem with such a relationship. Maybe this was directed at me?
That I’m strange? Or that religious people are scary? Or both? Or on everything I’ve ever said?
About dating religious people, that is, not about being strange! I wouldn’t exactly phrase it as being worried that they’d leave me with no explanation, but if they do believe in God then that would make them so different from me that I don’t know how we’d get along on a day to day basis. And I consider myself an agnostic.
Not to go too far off on a tangent here, but people who espouse a religion have a certain set of beliefs that they can point to – the Bible, for example. So when I see people who claim they believe in the Bible, and yet don’t follow any of its dictates, I allow myself to be skeptical about their beliefs. Atheists, on the other hand, because they have no set belief system, are at least proof against this form of inconsistency. Though I grant, if someone said they were an atheist, and yet superstitiously believed in knocking on wood, for example, I’d say you’d be justified in being skeptical about their atheism.
And let me say that I wouldn’t qualify my wife as someone very religious. But everything I know about her religiosity, or lack of it, I know by inference. To me, this is one of those subjects NOT TO BE TOUCHED, and I don’t care how many relationship advice books say the contrary. Ignorance is sometimes bliss, may the Blessed Cecil forgive me.
Welcome, stranger. We call this place “Earth”. You’ll need these three critical pieces of advice to get along here: don’t tug on Superman’s cape, don’t spit into the wind, and watch out for the ladies - they’re fickle, they are. 
Oddly enough, Jeremy Irons said something similar here too it seems. Strange indeed.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I meant that you clearly believe that people who believe in organized religion (“Jesus in a rowboat” as you said in your OP) are by nature irrational people. While I disagree, I absolutely acknowledge your right & ability to believe that. So I was just offering up…advice I guess, that it would be nicer to say “I believe that religious people are irrational” rather than what I thought I read, which was more a factual statement; i.e.
That’s all - just some hope that we could keep the thread from trainwreck-land if someone got pissed at the language instead of the meaning.
And that’s why I agree with what you’re doing. If you feel that religious people are more likely to be irrational and that would frustrate/annoy you, then by all means avaoid them. I guess I was just trying to say that I don’t think that religious people are any more or less likely to be irrational for no apparent reason than the rest of the population - I’ve found that the irrational religious people who attribute their irratiuonality to their religion are few and are easily recognized as such from the get go. As you said, “Jesus told me to buy this car!” is strange, and that typically is obvious in all aspects of a person’s life. I think that the likelihood that a person would be otherwise normal and then suddenly go religious wacko is small, but that’s my opinion and not necessarily 100% accurate.
Sorry, yes, the second part was directed to you. I just forgot to type in your name first, and didn’t realize until after I submitted it that it was subject to confusion.
To describe yourself? That seems either dishonest or disingenuous to me.
twicks, who really is “spiritual but not religious”
What exactly does that mean? I’ve never been able to figure that out.
Why? Atheism and superstition aren’t contradictory, unless you avoid walking under ladders in case a god strikes you down.
Whenever we have this discussion, it tends to boil down to that “spirituality” means “unorganized religion” and “religion” means “organized religion”. Why they won’t just use the unambiguous terms, I don’t know.
For me, it means I believe in (what, for lack of a better term, we might as well call [a]) god, but that I’m not a Christian – or otherwise associated with any organized religion.
Religion, by (most) definition(s), involves an organized group of believers, or a community of some sort. Thus spirituality, which is more individual, is a meaningfully distinct category.
twicks, PhD, sociology of religion
That can be much more easily and unambiguously distinguished by simply using “organized” and “unorganized”. Or “personal”, if you prefer.
More easily to you – scholars use the specific terms with various meanings and implications attached. IOW, your choice of arbitrary terms comes after a different set of arbitrary terms have come to be agreed upon by a large group of people who think about this for a living.
Most of the time, when someone says something like “spiritual but not religious”, someone will ask what the hell the distinction is. Using my terms, that everybody understands whether they think about it for a living or not, that wouldn’t happen.
Feel free to join pseud over there in the “if everyone thought like me the world would be a better place” corner.