Whenever I used to hear someone make an argument or profess a belief I considered incorrect, I had the tendency to always try to destroy it right when it came up, because most people will be at least somewhat willing to talk about anything that comes up randomly, but will act like you’re being annoying or like you care too much if you try to attack one of their beliefs unprovoked. For example, I would think to myself, “This is my chance. Their religious beliefs may never come up again. I must make use of this opportunity.”
But then I realized something. If someone has a belief that really may never come up in conversation again, then it clearly doesn’t predict much, or have much of an effect on their practical life, or really anything at all. So for this discussion, the point of this story is that you don’t have to attack her religious beliefs directly. If they have any bearing on reality, or on her actual practical life, or anything at all, they’ll constantly come up by themselves, and you’ll have opportunity after opportunity to destroy them, and not seem like one of those annoying people who always make it their agenda to ram their beliefs down one’s throat.
And if they have no bearing on anything, then they’re irrelevant anyway, and need not be considered. I’ve always wondered, what the hell does it mean to “convert” to Catholicism or Christianity or something? Does something about one’s person change as a result? Is it like getting a tattoo? Or is it like joining a club? What actually happens as a result? What changes about one’s behavior, or one’s models of reality, or predictions about what will happen in which situation, or anything like that? It seems rather opaque to me, though of course the answer lies in complex signaling games, or extremely complicated things like why humans have the tendency to think there must be something like “objective morality”, rather than just make the ridiculously simple observation that agents have utility functions (or whatever complication you wish to make thereof, to add rigor, such as to take akrasia into account), and that some are different than others.
I guess I’m just saying that it doesn’t really matter whether she’s “religious” (whatever that means), unless it has a corrosive effect on her behavior in other areas, such as by messing up her practical epistemology and causing her to make worse decisions in her everyday life, or by causing her to think her bisexuality is “wrong” or something. But in any of those cases, it would be best to deal with them directly, and let religion come up only within that context, so as to avoid all the abstract nonsense, and deal with nothing but concrete reality.
Whenever I used to hear someone make an argument or profess a belief I considered incorrect, I had the tendency to always try to destroy it right when it came up, because most people will be at least somewhat willing to talk about anything that comes up randomly, but will act like you’re being annoying or like you care too much if you try to attack one of their beliefs unprovoked. For example, I would think to myself, “This is my chance. Their religious beliefs may never come up again. I must make use of this opportunity.”
But then I realized something. If someone has a belief that really may never come up in conversation again, then it clearly doesn’t predict much, or have much of an effect on their practical life, or really anything at all. So for this discussion, the point of this story is that you don’t have to attack her religious beliefs directly. If they have any bearing on reality, or on her actual practical life, or anything at all, they’ll constantly come up by themselves, and you’ll have opportunity after opportunity to destroy them, and not seem like one of those annoying people who always make it their agenda to ram their beliefs down one’s throat.
And if they have no bearing on anything, then they’re irrelevant anyway, and need not be considered. I’ve always wondered, what the hell does it mean to “convert” to Catholicism or Christianity or something? Does something about one’s person change as a result? Is it like getting a tattoo? Or is it like joining a club? What actually happens as a result? What changes about one’s behavior, or one’s models of reality, or predictions about what will happen in which situation, or anything like that? It seems rather opaque to me, though of course the answer lies in complex signaling games, or extremely complicated things like why humans have the tendency to think there must be something like “objective morality”, rather than just make the ridiculously simple observation that agents have utility functions (or whatever complication you wish to make thereof, to add rigor, such as to take akrasia into account), and that some are different than others.
I guess I’m just saying that it doesn’t really matter whether she’s “religious” (whatever that means), unless it has a corrosive effect on her behavior in other areas, such as by messing up her practical epistemology and causing her to make worse decisions in her everyday life, or by causing her to think her bisexuality is “wrong” or something. But in any of those cases, it would be best to deal with them directly, and let religion come up only within that context, so as to avoid all the abstract nonsense, and deal with nothing but concrete reality.