You can't force a child to believe in God anymore than you can force them to like brocholi.
Uhh... I think the human race has proven that you can force a child to do practically anything. And belief is hardly the most challenging example of this power. For the first few years of a child's life he is a sponge, soaking up everything he sees, hears and experiences. My second-generation atheist parents "forced" me to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny by showing me the gifts they had left for us on their respective holidays.
We trust our parents by instinct; it's a survival trait in most endothermic animals because we can't survive without them for a while after birth. So the option of wondering whether they might be lying and instead set out those gifts while I was sleeping never entered my mind. Some baby animals, especially of non-social species like tigers, stop regarding their parents as perfect as soon as they can start gathering their own food, but it takes us several years before the phrase "my parents might be wrong" becomes allowable in our heads. This is why even abusive parents are trusted: "They must have a reason for punishing me even though I can't see it."
Fortunately they were kind enough to explain the truth before long. A couple of years later when I learned that some children believed in "God" I asked them why their parents had not yet told them the truth about that. They squirmed and said that the problem is that their parents' parents had never told
them the truth. I said that couldn't be true. After being told about Santa Claus I figured out the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy all by myself. Surely at some early point in childhood these people would realize that God is also a fairytale. Right, Momma? Right, Daddy? Hello? More squirming as they had to admit that somehow many adults never manage to figure that out. This was the point in my life when I became a cynic. I'm supposed to
respect these morons? You're kidding!
You have a choice whether to accept what you know as knowledge or not.
You don't have this choice at the beginning of your life. It's something that evolves as your brain continues to grow to its full size and power. Humans are born with the smallest brain (relative to adult size) of any placental mammal precisely because the adult size is so uniquely enormous that it can't possibly fit through the birth canal. (Whose width is constrained by our also-unique habit of bipedalism and the resulting need for our legs to not be so far apart that the rocking couple generated by walking would make us look and feel like cartoon characters.)
Just as it takes a few years to start wondering whether our parents are
always right, it also takes a while before we start questioning the veracity of things
we know. As I have pointed out many times on this website,
Homo sapiens clearly has an instinct to believe in supernatural creatures and other phenomena. It occurs in every culture in every era, what Jung calls an
archetype. People like my family who don't have this instinct are clearly a recent mutation, and hopefully one that will be selected for in future generations. It's difficult to figure out what environmental pressure caused this instinct to propagate. Perhaps it was a perfectly rational response to a danger our distant ancestors faced that we can't possibly imagine. But it's just as likely that it was simply passed down by sheer chance through a genetic bottleneck; we have gone through more than one of those.
At any rate, something that you have
known since birth
feels more true than any knowledge you acquire later through reasoning and learning. Therefore instinctive motifs are damnably difficult to get rid of.
I know you're being molly-cuddled, and advised that I'm a troll, and to put me on ignore. But I know i'm not trolling . . . .
I did not mean to imply that I was accusing you of trolling, at least not this time. You were
bullying the poor fellow. Perhaps it honestly didn't feel like that to you, but it sure looked like it to me. For this reason I only suggested that one person consider putting you on IGNORE, not that you be subject to discipline by the moderators.
. . . . and the only reason i'm to be put on ignore is because I'm asking question that reveal your true state of mind, instead of playing the usual game.
No, it's because you caught a fellow at a moment in his life when he feels besieged and bullied
by his own family, and your response was to besiege and bully him
yourself. You didn't just question decisions which he had made slowly and carefully and logically, and were so important that he was willing to undergo the grief of family turbulence in order to be true to himself and stand by them... you actually told him after all that time and effort that
his decisions are wrong! How can you possibly have gathered enough information about this major chunk of his life to be so cavalier about dismissing it as a wrong turn?
Secularists cannot define spirituality because such a definition does not exist in the language.
Poppycock. To drill down from "spirituality" through "spiritual" to "spirit" in Dictionary.com: "2. the incorporeal part of humans; 3. the soul regarded as separating from the body at death; 4. conscious, incorporeal being, as opposed to matter; 9. the divine influence as an agency working in the human heart; 10. a divine, inspiring, or animating being or influence; 12. the soul or heart as the seat of feelings or sentiments, or as prompting to action; 25. God."
Since the word "spirit" has numerous other meanings with no supernatural overtones I left them out. These are the meanings that carry forward to "spiritual" and "spirituality." Indeed we who are not religious insist that "the incorporeal part of humans," "the soul," "divine influence," and "God" refer to fantasy rather than reality. But we still understand them and can use them correctly.
You advise a man to divorce his wife because she believes in God?
No. I advise a man to include
the possibility of divorcing his wife as one option in his search for a solution, in order for him to see the full spectrum of futures available to him. And in any case, not to divorce her because she believes in God, but because
she and her entire family are bullying him about it. This arguably falls into the category of
spousal abuse, which always suggests divorce as a
realistic choice but not by any means the best or only choice. I think that when a person expands his field of view to take in all realistic resolutions to his problem, it makes it much easier to decide what to do. He may very well say, "Screw you Fraggle, ain't no way I'm gonna do that!" In which case he'll have no choice but to take the other potential resolutions
much more seriously and stop asking for help in making such an intimate, personal decision.
You describe her's and her children's life position as ''vile crap'' without even knowing them?
Like all Americans I have lived my entire life surrounded by religion. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is "vile crap."
I have followed jaylew's journey from the day he announced that he was an atheist, and am aware of his reasoning. For any of us to even consider divorce, and say it out loud, is nothing short of potential destruction.
I respect your point of view (for a change
) but I disagree. I don't think he's going to get anywhere in this endless saga of tortured reasoning, until and unless he is willing to include
every potential solution in the list of possibilities. If he doesn't admit to himself that divorce is one way out of this particular dilemma, but it will introduce a host of other dilemmas into his life (several of which will be utterly horrible), he's shielding himself from the true range of consequences, and therefore from the true importance of the original dilemma.
If I can dither over whether I should put a full-time diaper on my elderly dog or simply restrict her to rooms with no carpeting, I can pretend that I can dither about that indefinitely. But if I have to accept the fact that she'll continue to get worse in many other ways until it becomes a quality-of-life issue, I suddenly have to slap myself in the face and get serious. Put on an industrial-grade diaper so I can hug her every night while we sleep, until we have to make that last slow trip to the vet.
As a Christian, the primary requirement is that one believes in God and accepts Jesus as the Son of God. Really, nothing else is required to get you to heaven.
Well... there is a very strong directive to spread the word of God throughout the land. After all Christianity, like Islam and unlike Judaism, is an
evangelical religion. Most American denominations soft-pedal this and consider themselves lucky if a large percentage of their congregation simply show up regularly rather than just on Christmas and Easter. But there are pentacostal/evangelical/charismatic/fundamentalist denominations where this is an important obligation. You probably don't get much of this Down Under, but up here we're often accosted by Jehovah's Witnesses ("the Watchtower Society"), Mormons ("Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints") and members of other very aggressive American-hatched churches who will keep telling us we're on our way to Hell and only they can save us, until we finally give them the finger and walk quickly away. When it's friends, neighbors or family, this can be a real problem. I get the impression that Jay's family doesn't belong to one of these churches, but nonetheless they seem to have the fear that they will fail in their duty to God if they let him go to Hell, and if God's in an Old-Testament kind of bad mood he might send them there with him for punishment.
So from a Christian point of view the worst thing possible is for your loved one not to believe; the non-believer risks his immortal soul. It is understandable that any true Christian will do his utmost to convince you to accept Christ into your life.
This is how we distinguish true old-fashioned Christians from the more modern American kind. They are beginning to understand the concept of metaphor. They recognize that a good person might actually be a good person, regardless of his attitude toward Bronze Age fairytales. Again, Jay's wife's church gives signs of falling into this category. He's clearly not outraged by long sermons about fire and brimstone because they don't take place in that church.
Since Paul essentially ditched the Jewish laws, the primary requirement for Christians has been to commit themselves to Christ. Everything else is secondary.
But the imperative to spread God's word to the four corners of the Earth (which was flat and square in those days) is very strong. After all, he had a big problem with the Jews because they decided not to be evangelical and (according to some Jewish scholars) this is the reason he's been punishing them relentlessly forever.
If it turns out that you're wrong and the Christian God does exist after all, then you still have nothing to worry about. That God is supposed to be All Good. He will understand why you didn't believe, and forgive you.
Exactly what our Christian friends tell us. They cannot believe in a god who is so burdened by pride and petulance that he'd toss people out of heaven for the single reason that they didn't believe in him.
If your relationship with your wife is strong enough, it should be able to withstand your telling her that you don't believe.
I'd guess that her parents are the bigger problem. In-laws have brought strife to many an otherwise well-adjusted marriage.
He loves his wife and family. Why would he want to give them up? For what?
To replace one kind of pain with another. Only he can decide which is worse. Unfortunately he'll only know how bad the second kind is after he's made a (certainly) irreversible decision to leave.
I get the feeling that divorce would not sit well with him.
It shouldn't sit well with any married person who still has young children in the home.
1. From what I gather, the difficulty arises from him, not from all parties. He feels that he cannot be honest with his wife, regarding his not believing in God.
He's made it quite clear that the bullying by her parents is a major part of his problem. She is bullying him too, but I wonder how long that would go on if her parents stopped.
I am not a theist, nor have I ever considered myself one, but I do think that once a person believes in God, they do so forever; and that if someone seems to have lost their faith in God, this is indicative that they didn't have it in the first place.
Wow. You've answered a question that the world's greatest philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries.
When will we be able to read the 500-page paper in which you set forth this incredible discovery in proper scholarly language and rebut the thousands of counterarguments you've already gotten?
There is a difference between belief in God and belief in Elvis Presley, for example.
Indeed. This is a place of science and we can explain that simply be trotting out the Scientific Method.
The Rule of Laplace advises us: Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before anyone is obliged to treat them with respect.
The existence of an invisible and illogical supernatural being living in an invisible and illogical supernatural universe who whimsically and often petulantly interferes with the operation of the natural universe would invalidate the fundamental premise that underlies all science: "The natural universe is a closed system whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical evidence of its present and past behavior." This makes the assertion of the existence of God
the most extraordinary assertion ever presented. So it clearly requires the presentation of some extraordinary evidence before we should bother listening to it being stated for the five-millionth time. By now we're so tired of it that we'd lower the bar and look at merely
ordinary evidence, yet even that is absent. The best we've been shown is one tortilla out of millions cooked every year with a scorch mark that is claimed to be the image of a biblical figure
of whom no portraits exist against which to compare it.
The existence of Elvis, on the other hand does not require the suspension of logic, common sense or the Scientific Method. He is said to have been a mere mortal who, with some musical talent and a lot of good luck, became one of dozens of pop stars of the rock'n'roll era, then died a perfectly mortal (and quintessentially rock-star) death. On top of that, there are a million hours of film, kinescope and audio recordings of him, and in addition millions of people who saw him perform and even met him personally are still alive to provide first-person evidence (not hearsay from people in the Bronze Age passed down through hundreds of generations).
Despite all of this, it's possible that Elvis was not real. But to claim that he was is
not an extraordinary assertion, so someone who makes that claim need not be escorted out of the academy of science covered with tar and feathers.
No, it's nonsense to say that being an atheist is "his" problem. An atheist is who he is, and if someone else has a problem with it, that's their problem.
Indeed. It's certainly
our problem that the majority of the people in this country are theists.
No, the problem is that they make him feel bad for being who he is.
Well put. That's bullying. The same way we bully people who are gay, female or dark-skinned.
Maybe you are right, and he is being pressured to convert, but he didn't say he was presented with that kind of pressure.
Actually I think he did. Unfortunately this thread has gotten too long to go back and search for it.
Wants to what? Stay with his wife? I'm sure he does, but that's not relevant to whether or not he can stay with her and be happy.
Uhh... I beg to differ. A man who wants to stay with his wife and does so will be considerably happier than one who did not want to stay but stayed for other reasons, such as providing a (somewhat) stable home for their children.
It's going to depend on whether or not his wife and family can get off his back about converting . . . .
This is why I have stressed to him that what they are doing is indeed
bullying. There's so much discussion today of the prevalence of bullying and the horrors it causes, that he might actually be able to make them stop and think when he brings that word into the family conversation.
