Quote:
Originally Posted by kokiri
I pretty much object to characterising agnosticism as 'weaseling'. I think, just like religion and atheism, there are lazy forms and unlazy forms. In fact, i find dawkins style atheism to be a form of cowardice, as far as i can see. The more i learn and the older i get, the more i think that the form and nature of the question is often far more important than clinging to a specific answer to something possibly unanswerable.
If you know any maths, God is like the Axiom of choice - there's no way of proving either side of the proposition, so people who waste their time hunting for a proof are idiots, but people who spend time wondering about the consequences, the implications and nature of that situation are quite possibly far from it.
I also object to the discourse by which religious people seem to lay claim to the moral high ground. I fail to see how some one who acts in what they perceive to be a moral way because either someone told them to, or because of some celestial quid pro quo, can claim to be more moral than people who act in a 'moral' way for reasons of their own making, and without expecting some payoff after death.
/rant
Many, many agnostics are not weaseling at all - but many more tat I encounter are.
The reason I'm focused on that is that on the Match.com site, one of the fields one fills out is religion — except it isn't a fill-in, there are about a dozen choices (on which one can then expand in a text field). I have always chosen atheism. In my experience by far the most common choices of those I might otherwise consider dating (but see below) were "agnostic" and "spiritual but not religious". And while each of these choices actually has meaning, in practice I found when talking to these people that "agnostic" actually meant "atheist, but don't want to antagonize people" while "spiritual but not religious" was actually a lot closer to genuine agnosticism.
I am not a fan, at all, of misrepresenting the truth — I think everyone gets that by now. And misrepresenting something so fundamental as what one believes... that's something I can't respect at all.
Oh, re dating and religion: In Texas, which is where I lived for most of my Match experience, just about everybody I encountered was either Baptist or Methodist, and for a majority of them, my atheism was a dealbreaker. I do respect that, as it really is important — I think it says a great deal about how one thinks, how one weighs the importance of the known versus the unknown and of received versus found evidence. I do believe that it isn't dispositive for me, and one person whom I believe I could have stayed with if I hadn't been an idiot about other things is quite Christian, but it's a major hurdle.
That said, I also believe that a majority of those Christians who wouldn't date me were thinking not that it was reflection of how we approached the world, nor of something mundane like how we'd spend Sundays or what we'd tell the kids, but of something reflected in your comments above: they truly did believe that someone with no spiritual grounding cannot be relied upon to be a good, moral person. This, I had a problem with. I will put my sense and right and wrong next to anyone's, and think I'll be found lacking occasionally but it won't be often, so it would seem that in my case anyway that's bunk.
I will admit, otoh, that in the West the prevalence of Christianity is pretty important to who we tend to be as a culture. It is pretty clear that, despite our numerous collective faults, Western (really I guess I mean US, but much of this applies elsewhere) culture teaches a greater respect for
individual human life than is generally taught in various (though not all) other parts of the world, and I think it would be shortsighted not to recognize that our largely Judeo-Christian religious tradition has something to do with it — we're pretty selective in how and when we choose to care about "Thou shalt not kill", for example, but it least most of us think it's important enough to give serious thought to. In my opinion the genocides of Rwanda or Cambodia really couldn't happen here (and yes, Hitler managed to convince a lot of Christians that slaughtering millions of people was a good, moral idea, but I think it would have been easier for him to do had there not been some religious basis for the society [but see below]). This still works in areas that are becoming less and less Christian, such as western Europe, because the values that go along with religion are passed from generation to generation and don't change rapidly.
Cleaning up a few loose ends from above:
First, I do believe that organized religion is very, very often a force for evil also, so the advancement of a sense of value of human life needs to be balanced against the divisiveness it all engenders. Millions upon millions of people have died because of differing visions of what god looks like or says, and that phenomenon shows no signs of fading into the oblivion it deserves. I think that human society is mature enough now that we would be better off if tomorrow everyone woke up with no religious beliefs at all — but I recognize that my sense of the balance could be wrong.
Another loose end: I do recognize that some cultural traditions value life more than ours; goodness knows I don't think we win this one outright.
And finally: I recognize that much of Western culture for the past few hundred years has not been driven by Christianity, and that the United States' Christian tilt wasn't always so evident, but I think that the views of eighteenth century humanists, for example, were still informed by the largely Christian beliefs that had held sway for many generations before than This is hugely oversimplifying the matter, yes; I'm just saying that it matters a ton in practice.