Title. Interested to see the response from different religions
Edit: Stating your religion would be appreciated. Lack of religion counts for the purpose of this question. Also let’s not downvote people for differing religions, all voices are welcome here. If no; why?
I’m an atheist. I dated a woman once who believed in spirits. I think she experienced night terrors among other things and interpreted them as supernatural phenomena. It didn’t cause problems then but I was a lot younger and I think now I’m less tolerant of that sort of thing. But who knows - I was crazy about her so maybe if I meet a woman I’m crazy about like that again then I’ll tolerate anything.
More recently I’ve dated people who believe in a vague sort of life after death but never someone who practiced any religion. I think I would immediately rule out practicing religious people if I were going through a list (as when dating online) but if I met someone in person, really liked her, and then found out she was religious then I’m not sure what I would do. It would definitely be off-putting.
The problem for me isn’t the lifestyle differences but rather my impression that religious people are missing the point about the basic nature of existence, when it really should be obvious. It makes me feel like I’m patronizing them, because to be frank I don’t tend to think of them as my intellectual equals. (And I know that makes me sound like a pompous jerk.)
Yea I kinda get the same feeling. Although for a lot of people their religion does not preclude the acceptation/understanding of a physical world, it’s a more of set of rites that they inherited and that’s part of their identity. There’s plenty of religious people who are scientists. For some, I imagine it may be difficult to reconcile.
I know that there are religious scientists and I think humans often compartmentalize beliefs in such a way that their belief about the supernatural doesn’t affect their assessment of real-world situations. I’ll even go further and say that often it seems like their belief affects their behavior much less than it logically ought to, with some (but not all) people who apparently sincerely believe in an all-seeing God and an afterlife still acting just like atheists in relevant situations. In this context, the fanatics are sometimes technically the more rational ones - I disagree with their premises, but their actions make sense if those premises are considered true.
It’s certainly weird how many people say that they believe and then just … don’t do anything that their belief says they should do.
I think people’s behavior is determined much more by social conventions and the expectations of their community (in addition to pragmatic self-interest) than it is by logical reasoning. I’ll risk being the preachy vegetarian by discussing people’s attitudes towards eating meat. Most people sincerely believe that cruelty to animals is wrong, and also that factory farming (if not all killing) is cruel. Yet they eat meat. I even know some people who started eating meat again after being ethical vegetarians. Did they change their minds about whether or not harming animals is bad? No. If pressed, they feel guilty but they don’t like to talk about it. The reason they’re eating meat is because it’s convenient and almost everyone expects them to, not because they reasoned from first principles. Likewise with religion - if no one else is giving everything away to the poor and everyone will think you’re crazy if you do rather than praising you, you’re not going to give everything away to the poor even if it would make sense to do so given what you believe.
Edit: Kidney donation is another example. I met a woman once who donated a kidney to a friend of her mother’s. This person wasn’t someone particularly dear to her, but she found out that he needed a kidney to live and she gave him hers. I think that what she did is commendable, but I still have both my kidneys. This is despite the fact that I sincerely believe that if, for example, I saw a drowning child then I would risk my life to save him. People would think I was a hero if I saved the child, or that I was a coward if I didn’t try. Meanwhile almost everyone I know would think I went crazy if I donated a kidney to a stranger. My relatives would be extremely worried, and they would try to talk me out of it. I’m not going to do something difficult, painful, and (to an extent) dangerous when everyone I know would disapprove, even if in principle I think risking my life to save another’s is a good thing to do.
I think your ideas here go into the right direction, but the confusing part for me is that many of the christians I know are so far below what you’d expect from a christian in these parts (which is already very little) - it’s not that they don’t give everything away to the poor, they’re doing (as far as I can tell) nothing - they don’t pray, they don’t go to church, and they don’t adhere to any of what the bible says they should do beyond maybe basic Golden Rule stuff. And it’s not even like most families would make a big deal out of it if you left the faith or even became fully atheist. Most do pay the church tax, though, which is about 1% of your gross income.
Here’s an incident that is only tangentially related to what we’re talking about, but it’s one that I found memorable. My grandmother was reading a tabloid newspaper (which she tends to believe) and it apparently had an article about UFOs. She turned to me and told me that, according to the newspaper, space aliens were real and visiting Earth. Then she went about her ordinary business - the thing about the aliens was simply an interesting bit of trivia for her.
I think her reaction was not in fact particularly unusual, but I found it baffling. The arrival of space aliens would be perhaps the most important thing that has ever happened to humanity. The entire future of the species would hang in the balance, and everything would hinge on what the aliens want. I know my grandmother very well but I still don’t really understand how she thinks about things like this. The best I can come up with is that she believes in many fantastical things and therefore just one more fantastical thing changes little for her.
This isn’t a direct response to what you’re describing but I think it’s relevant as an illustration of one way how the fantastical can be less important than the mundane for people.