Sure.
I don’t find guys with big muscles and no chest hair attractive. I’d be very hard pressed to say why I don’t, but I don’t.
I dated a guy in college who seemed like he would be perfect for me. But I just didn’t love him, and to this day (10 years later), I still don’t know why. There’s no way I could ever explain it if I don’t even know why that relationship didn’t work out.
And what area would you say this is?
I don’t really see it as a big problem – at least, not if the SO isn’t thoroughly devout to the point where belief systems can’t help but clash, not to mention schedules and activities and issues of morality and such. My wife is catholic, though not particularly devout; she doesn’t go to church – she doesn’t even pray – but she holds a belief in God. I’m an agnostic with atheistic leanings; I don’t believe but I try and keep an open mind just on the off chance that I kick off, find myself facing St. Peter and having to come up with some suitable excuse for my shameless heathenism.
Neither of us get into any scraps over religion though – we almost never discuss it either, and if the topic does come up I’ll listen to her and let her hold her beliefs as she sees fit. I simply don’t offer any opinion because there’s really no point in it. And she’s fine with my lack of belief, so it works out just fine.
Relationships- who I’m attracted to or not, or who I can or can’t have a satisfactory relationship with. Those things certainly have nothing to do with religion (the latter one could have, but in this case it didn’t).
Oh. Well, I can list you plenty of things that fall under the category of “personal tastes”–relationships, foods, music, on and on, that are simply going to be decided by people’s personal choices, but these aren’t conscious decisions that people have made.
Unlike religion. If you like wool against your skin, and I don’t, you would never (I hope) even think to try to convince me that wool feels nice against my skin because it feels nice against yours. We’d just agree to disagree, but you woulnd’t (I hope) feel that your p.o.v. was somehow correct, or even important. This category I would say is termed “trivial personal preferences.” But religion isn’t trivial, certainly not to the people who believe in it and organize their whole lives around it.
At some point in the “Wool feels nice against your skin” discussion, you’d certainly back off and say, “OK I guess wool doesn’t feel nice to you. iT DOESN’T MATTER VERY MUCH, HA HA” But I never get the feeling,even when religious people pretend to be broad-minded, that they’re actually thinking “I could be completely wrong about this issue, and it doesn’t matter a tiny bit.” It matters a lot, and they take a great (and wrong-headed) confidence in the correctness of their positions because the positions belong to an established orthodoxy. “How can I possibly be wrong?–millions of [fill in blank here] have thought so for thousands of years, and the [fill in holy text here] assures me that this is so, even if I cant understand it well enough to explain it to anyone.” That’s a hell of a lot of misplaced confidence that simply never applies to a personal expression of aesthetic taste.
But some personal preferences certainly aren’t trivial in a relationship. My love of pets isn’t trivial to me in a relationship- I’d have trouble being in a relationship with anyone who didn’t like them, because I want to have pets at all times if possible. For some people, having (or not having) children is really important to them, and can be a deal-breaker in a relationship.
Eh- post sometime that you like brussels sprouts, and see how many people tell you with quite a bit of confidence that they’re terrible. Or go to a group of wine aficionados and say that your favorite wine is White Zinfandel. Or go to an upscale cheese shop and tell them you like Velveeta. You’ll hear some expressions of aesthetic taste defended with a vigor normally associated with religion.
But this is not true of everyone.
It doesn’t really seem that there’s a level of… religiosity, I guess, that you’re comfortable with. There’s a difference between “I make a point to go to the Easter and the Christmas services at my local church” and “I go to church every other day of the week and you’re coming too or you’re going to HELL and also all my friends are through the church because everyone else is going to HELL.”
Not every religious person is a Creationist or believes that everyone who doesn’t subscribe to their belief is eternally damned. I believe in an afterlife and a Creator and… well, in a few really irrational things, while fully realizing that they are irrational. This is why I don’t expect other people to go to church with me or anything. I find the entire experience uplifting, a more marvelous feeling than I’ve had in any other facet of my life. I find going to a service at my favorite church like taking a wonderful shower after a long day of working in the sun.
But I realize that there is no way to prove that there actually is a God out there, and I highly doubt that He particularly cares where I am on Sunday. It may be praise for Him, but it’s also solace for Me. I’ll be sad (if I have time) if I die and there’s nothing after, but I won’t consider my time wasted. I also read fantasy and science fiction novels and think ‘What if?’ a lot and fantasize.
I have my reasons for belief. They’re not rational. I accept that, as well as the fact that people might consider me as unbalanced as if I believed that… uh… that Tolkien’s hobbits were living under Mount Bonnell and the elves lived in the forest behind my house. That’s their perogative, and it’s a reasoned one. But I also second-guess myself a lot and try to be introspective and thoughtful. I try to be rational in the other respects of my life, shoving all my irrationality into being religious. 
As a result of being a decent person as well as being religious, I try to keep in mind that I should treat all people as though they were my family. That I should be patient and kind and giving to those in need, that I should remember when I lose my temper that the other person is just another human being with feelings and needs and emotions. And if I suddenly get the feeling that I just Shouldn’t Be With Someone, I don’t ignore it, but I sure as hell don’t base my every decision on it. I make decisions based on rationality an awful lot more than I do on feelings.
Being religious has actually helped me do this, because it gives me a point of reference to step back and say things like “Okay. I may be seriously pissed off at you, but Jesus wouldn’t be a bitch, so I’m going to be chill about it, just like the Big JC in front of Herod. Besides, you can’t have me executed.”
[size=1]okay, it’s usually not like that. But I do say ‘now, is this the Christ-like thing to do? No. You need to be patient and loving, even if that bastard cuts you off’.[/size=1]
I’m not exactly hurt that I’m not rational enough for you, pseudo, but I do rather think that if you believe religious people to be completely irrational people that you definitely shouldn’t date them. That opinion will come through if you’re around a person for too long.
So irrational am I that I forgot how to do size code. Or preview. I have also decided that brown cardboard is a tool of Satan and am burning a heap of it in the back yard. You know. For Christ.
Possibly something in the realm of ethics/morals (“I believe that it’s wrong to _____”), or politics (e.g. “I believe George W. Bush is doing a great job”), or one of the great unresolved questions of philosophy (like whether or not we have free will).
Ultimately, though, whether a position is capable of being explained to someone who doesn’t already hold it depends, not just on the position, but on the explainer and the explainee. You’d have to say for yourself which, if any, positions you don’t think could be explained to you, and how you know that you just hadn’t encountered a good enough explanation yet.
I’m 100% behind you in inquiring, early on, into a person’s core beliefs before you get too seriously involved with them. I too would want to know what a potential partner believed, and whether or not they had good reasons for those beliefs, reasons that made it at least as rational for that person to hold them as not to hold them. I just don’t understand why belief in God is the one and only thing that you’ve decided a priori can’t be explained or justified.
No, there are oodles of nutty things a woman could tell me that will make me run out of the room, including admiration for George W. and the fact that she has her own penis and it’s throbbing for me. But basically it’s belief in God, 19 times out of 20.
::shrug:: You have a very skewed perception of how the religious person’s mind works, then. You know my religious views, broadly speaking: it doesn’t therefore imply that I expect the lump of lead in my pocket to transform into a gold nugget any time soon, or that the square root of two will, against expectation, be discovered to be a rational number, or that if the baked potato I split open appears to contain the message “find out pseudotriton ruber ruber’s real name and location, and put a bullet in his head” I will immediately do so. A belief in something you find too large to swallow does not imply a belief in anything and everything. No matter to what extent you equate belief in God with belief in the MSP, IPU or FSM, it is not in fact the case that all religious people therefore do believe in those three entities, nor in any other piece of nonsense you care to posit.
Your recent posting history on the subject of religion persuades me that your hypothetical religious female date would, on mentioning her faith, promptly find herself given no shortage of legitimate and rational reasons for breaking up with you. :dubious:
It’s not necessary that ALL religious people believe in X, or Y, or Z wholeheartedly for me to be creeped out. On an irrationality scale of 1-100, though, with me being a 3 and Jim Bakker’s choir member being a 98, I get scared off around 40 or so and downright terrified at 65.