Ursus Pacificus

September 19th is National Talk Like A Pirate Day. It’s one of the high holy days for us Pastafarians

Speaking of things holy, I recently was involved in a discussion with some folks about online dating sites. One of my complaints is that some sites, particularly eHarmony, don’t acknowledge atheism as a world view with at least as much merit as, say, Christianity, and they’re perfectly content to lump the “non-religious” or “other” along with the positive, strong atheists. I took exception to this, stating that there is a vast gulf between “non-religious” and atheist.

One of the participants in the discussion (let’s call him “Arlo” for the sake of convenient reference) didn’t understand the distinction. Arlo’s position was that “you have to accept another person’s faith”.

No, I don’t.

If a person’s faith is inconsistent with reality, then it is false. I am under no obligation to accept false things.

I told Arlo that a person can believe whatever he or she likes, but if that belief is inconsistent with reality, then said person is going to be seriously disappointed at some point.

That made Arlo very uncomfortable, and he asked to stop the discussion of religion. I obliged.

My point about the dating thing is that if person A (call him Al) is seriously dating person B (call her Betty), then Al and Betty need to be able to agree on some basic things, in order to reliably agree on more complicated issues. If Betty believes that there are no gods, heavens or hells, and therefore all religions are at least misleading, and Al believes in the Abrahamic god and the inerrancy of the Christian bible, then they’re likely to disagree on a great many issues which ultimately are founded in those beliefs. In a society where the curriculum of public education, the direction of the highest court in the land, and the general mode of discourse are determined (at lease in part) by “the mob”, it is disquieting to Betty that Al is more a part of the problem, than part of the solution. Similarly, Al is aware that Betty votes, and while she is in the minority, the minority she’s in seems to be getting louder every day.

At some point, we all have to live together and cooperate (on some level). That doesn’t mean that Al and Betty need to be at each other’s throats day in and day out over common household decisions. Al’s a Christian and Betty’s an atheist. Neither of them can genuinely accept the other’s world view without being untrue to their own.

I was once involved in an unnecessarily long email conversation with someone I met on Match.com. She was a Christian. She was also a biochemist. To me, this is incongruous. Biochemistry is a science. Religion is not. I asked her (early on) how she reconciles her career and her faith. She said she didn’t think she had to. Uh. Yeah. She told me how tolerant she is, and then asked me if I would sit in a church with her and hold her hand at her father’s funeral. Well, the whole hand-holding thing is predicated on me being in a serious relationship with her, which is highly unlikely based on our differing opinions on science, religion, and death, thus the point is moot. She obviously hung up her lab coat and intellect on adjacent pegs on her way out of the lab at the end of the day.

A big part of dating compatibility, I think, is rooted in the ideas at the foundation of a person’s world view. Certain consequences naturally follow from certain fundamental ideas. Sure, the fine-grained detail might lead one to think that Evangelical Christianity and Fundamentalist Islam are radically different, but… they’re not, if you can view them side-by-side with the appropriate level of abstraction, viz:

• Both believe in an invisible, capricious, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful god.
• Both believe in the inerrancy of an ancient text purportedly written by one or more people of dubious objective credibility
• Both believe theirs is the one true faith, to the exclusion of all others
• Both believe that heresy and apostasy are punishable sins
• Both believe that their god is directly involved in the day-to-day workings of everything seen and unseen.
• Both believe in eternal reward for the righteous and eternal punishment for the wicked.
• Both believe in the idea that the practice of science is bad and/or wrong, but use the products of that practice to spread and enforce their doctrines and injure or kill their opponents
• Need I go on?

It is conceivable (however highly unlikely) that a Christian and an Muslim could live happily together with minimal friction, provided they proceed from the “different names of god” assumption… that they really believe the same basic ideas, and the details are trivial.

It is so unlikely as to be virtually inconceivable that an atheist and a Christian (or Muslim or Whatever) could live happily together because the atheist discounts the founding premise of the Christian’s (or Muslim’s or Whatever’s) world view.

So, at the end of the day, I still maintain, you can believe whatever you like, but if your beliefs don’t line up with commonly observable objective reality, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

RAmen

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 8:42 am and is filed under Oh, my lack of gods!, The Tao of Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.