An ERE dating site

How to pass, fit in, eventually set an example, and ultimately lead the way.
chenda
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by chenda »

Crusader wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 4:36 pm
Compatibility means many things, but for me, what makes me stand out is my militant atheism. I can't even handle if someone is agnostic or believes in karma or destiny. I really want a female version of Richard Dawkins.
I'm not sure such a women exists. Would you tolerate some woo if she was exceptionally hot ?

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Alphaville
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Alphaville »

chenda wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:00 pm
I'm not sure such a women exists.
i'm sure they exist...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_feminism

eta check it out hahaha
https://www.atheistmatchmaker.com/
link looked spammy, it harvested my duckduckgo search via ad link, but there is the website
another: https://www.atheistdatingservice.com/
Last edited by Alphaville on Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Crusader
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Crusader »

chenda wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:00 pm
Would you tolerate some woo if she was exceptionally hot ?
Historically, I have not, in the context of a serious relationship. I can be very attracted to such a woman, but meaning that I have to commit to this woman in the long run, not look for others etc, just makes me extremely unhappy to the point that I can't do it.

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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Crusader »

Alphaville wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:05 pm
Here is the thing, I am not an atheist activist, I don't go to atheist meetups, atheism is, for all intents and purposes, a completely irrelevant trait of mine to an objective observer. It is just that I can't (fully) intellectually respect someone who isn't. It would be like someone who believes in Santa Claus. At one point you grow up and move on with your life and never discuss the matter again.

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Alphaville
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Alphaville »

Crusader wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:13 pm
I am not an atheist activist, [...]At one point you grow up and move on with your life and never discuss the matter again.
the activists i just linked because @chenda was asking if such women existed and that was the first link the search turned up (i wanted to offer objective proof rather than mere opinion of their existence)

but anyway, atheism is an important value for you, regardless of public demonstrations, maybe it needs to be upfront as a dealbreaker in your presentation if that's what will break the deal eventually.

i used to have a very smart girlfriend who was nevertheless religious and we always clashed on that point (we also clashed on others). it wasn't for me a matter of "respect" but a question of how should one live one's life, i.e. a question of values. so in the end we couldn't make it work.

so might as well filter upfront, as it's difficult to "convert" someone. although some people have converted in order to marry someone, it's usually within a compatible set of beliefs, rather than from belief to non-belief.

Crusader
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Crusader »

Alphaville wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:27 pm
Yes, I am coming to that conclusion myself. I went on a date with a girl on Sunday and I am sure many many guys would consider her a catch. She was pretty, ambitious (not that I care too much but it's definitely a plus if you are able to be successful at your job), pleasant to be around, seems honest and that she has good family values. She is not even that religious, but she prays to God when she is going through difficult times in her life. And I just can't get over that (I LJBFed her). In the past I used to be really bothered by my inflexibility in that regard, and it's funny that I have only lately really accepted myself for who I am: that my insistence on atheism is effectively a sexual orientation for me (in the context of a serious relationship).

chenda
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by chenda »

@alphaville - haha, to be fair actually I was once a vaguely militant atheist until I changed my mind, so yes they exist. Though I think @crusader perhaps Dawkins style atheism is too small a niche, for women or men. I mean I'm sure there are lots of atheist women but when you apply all the other filters you might be narrowing the field too much unless you get lucky.

Though perhaps focusing on urban areas in very secular countries might increase the chances, like Dutch or Swedish women ?

Crusader
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Crusader »

chenda wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:47 pm
I was once a vaguely militant atheist until I changed my mind, so yes they exist.
Time out! You changed your mind about atheism or *militant* atheism? If it was about atheism itself, why? How? There are very few of your kind.

Miss Lonelyhearts
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Miss Lonelyhearts »

Well, it's fairly uncommon (but obviously not unheard of) for people who profess "belief" in God to expect literal slide down the chimney and Nintendo delivery. And never discussing Santa Claus again is more the province of unhinged grouch than mature adult, since child-rearing, anthropological investigation, and friendly relations with Christmas decorating neighbors could all reasonably require further discussion.

In any case, I try to be militantly respectful of the notion that everyone is free to name their own dealbreakers and articulate an entirely personal, subjective notion of relationship success. OTOH, it's also the case that insisting on highly rigid qualifiers before an undertaking begins is often a defense from addressing some unacknowledged fear, whose origin can be quite obscure. Whatever the case, good luck out there :)

@7: gotcha. My thought was that cost being somewhat more nebulous in the dating world than e.g. home construction (where I first heard the cheap-quick-good trilemma explained) it could be broken down more granularly, since price could represent both "have to sit in audience for his E Street Cover Band gigs" as well as "have to provide ad hoc mothering to undomesticated 60yo," but neither converts easily to USD. What would you say are the big expenses you're not willing to undertake?

chenda
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by chenda »

Crusader wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:50 pm
Time out! You changed your mind about atheism or *militant* atheism? If it was about atheism itself, why? How? There are very few of your kind.
I changed from atheism to theism. I begun reading philosophy in 2016, especially Kant, which caused me to re-evaluate my materialist beliefs and then went on to study Indian philosophy in depth. I don't follow a labelled religion but have borrowed a few things from various religions. I will happily discuss it in more detail but maybe on another thread because I don't want to derail.

Crusader
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Re: An ERE dating site

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chenda wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 6:04 pm
I will happily discuss it in more detail but maybe on another thread because I don't want to derail.
Nah, it's ok, I think you gave me enough to go on. I have only known or 3 people who changed from atheism to theism, you are number 4.

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Alphaville
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Alphaville »

chenda wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:47 pm
Though perhaps focusing on urban areas in very secular countries might increase the chances, like Dutch or Swedish women ?
from what ive read somewhere (taleb maybe?) the low participation in religion in europe is due to government regulation, which creates a lack of competition that discourages new customers.

surveys apparently show prayer and belief in an afterlife happen a lot in europe in spite of lack of church participation... so the number of "believers" might be a lot greater than assumed.

anyway i see religion as a part and parcel of human evolution... whether it's from a conflation of two brain modules as some hypothesize or a way to cope with the stress of cognition, religious and ritual behavior is pretty much universal, but given sufficient genetic diversity there will be exceptions.

so i accept that strong agnosticism is the most reasonable empirical conclusion in the face of everything, but i also recognize that there are no atheists in the trenches, and i won't hold it against them when they make unreasonable pleas to the cosmos under duress :D

so while i tolerate any number of religious behaviors, and i have a special soft spot for little charming superstitions, what really pisses me off is when a particular religion claims to be "the only way." :evil:

chenda
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by chenda »

Alphaville wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 7:32 pm
from what ive read somewhere (taleb maybe?) the low participation in religion in europe is due to government regulation, which creates a lack of competition that discourages new customers.
Religion isn't really regulated in Europe, a few countries like England and Denmark (I think ?) still have an established, state supported church but that's more of a historical legacy thing. Anyone can start there own religion.

I expect it's predominantly due to higher rates of urbanisation and population density, which is generally correlated with declining religiousity. Although the US is often seen as a religious outlier amongst western countries, I would imagine coastal cities are similar to Europe, which hasn't got a vaste rural area like the mid west.

Although it's complicated, even defining religion is contentious. Thus is a good short video on this by a religious studies academic: https://youtu.be/HbO7yf9sahg

I would agree humans are hardwired to believe in religious/supernatural things. One fascinating question to me is whether other species of humans had anything akin to religious beliefs, or whether other animals do. Some animals have been observed engaging in behaviour which appears (to us) as ritual like, but really we have no idea.

IlliniDave
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by IlliniDave »

Alphaville wrote:
Wed Jan 27, 2021 7:32 pm
anyway i see religion as a part and parcel of human evolution... whether it's from a conflation of two brain modules as some hypothesize or a way to cope with the stress of cognition, religious and ritual behavior is pretty much universal, but given sufficient genetic diversity there will be exceptions.
I tend to think this way too. In the big picture sense religions provide ideological frameworks to organize a society when values come into conflict in the vast seas of gray between discrete laws. It can lower the "government" intervention required to keep everyone pulling roughly in the same direction. Old ones that coevolved with successful cultures likely encode an amount of wisdom that aided the cultures' success along with the doses of woo. It's perhaps ironic that many people seem to be turning to political parties to fulfill that function in modern societies, forming what amounts to godless theocracies.

Personal prayer or it's equivalents in most of the traditions I've learned about fulfills a similar role to meditation.

Underneath it all I'd guess virtually all of us have a moral code of some kind. As long as it manifests in their being a good neighbor, it's hard for me to get worked up over where it comes from.

chenda
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by chenda »

The other thing is that 'religion' as a paradigm arguably only really works for Christianity and Islam. Although extremely diverse, they both subscribe to a core set of beliefs which can be summarised in a short paragraph or two. It's pretty much impossible to summarise or explain say Hinduism or Shintoism in the same way, as these 'isms' were constructs of outsiders. No Indian or Japanese person ever called themselves Hindu or Shinto until foreigners began interfering. Arguably the west is returning to the looser, diverse spirituality which characterise/d much of Asia or pre-christian Europe. The modern Christianity of Sweden, for example, sounds a lot like Shintoism, a set of cultural practices which has little to do with say a literal belief in salvation.

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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Crusader »

For me, it's pretty clear what I consider "religion", i.e. my dating dealbreaker. If you don't believe in a universe that is solely governed by the physical laws and you believe that "something" can interfere with them in a non-random way, then you believe in some "higher power". A deterministic universe (with randomness) follows, so does materialism and physicalism (terms I learned later, as I am not a philosopher).

If you are going through the motions (e.g. celebrating Christmas with family, meditation), because it helps your brain, that's fine, as long as you don't *actually* believe that what you are doing has any other impact other than in your brain (and I guess by extension your body and others that interact with you).

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Alphaville
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Alphaville »

Crusader wrote:
Thu Jan 28, 2021 9:57 am
If you don't believe in a universe that is solely governed by the physical laws and you believe that "something" can interfere with them in a non-random way, then you believe in some "higher power". A deterministic universe (with randomness) follows, so does materialism and physicalism (terms I learned later, as I am not a philosopher).
the fly in that ointment is that we don't actually know every law of physics, and we don't actually know what "the universe" is; therefore this positivist stance becomes a profession of faith in itself, namely: "what i know is all there is" (a credo).

one can keep a mental placeholder for the enormity of the unknown without it having to be a "higher power" or some other form of wishful thinking. it's really possible to just not know and live with it. it's not easy, but it's possible.

and one could even apply wittgenstein's "whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent," which is not a declaration of non-existence of ineffable or unknown things, but about the absurdity of speechifying about them (that is something that grates me about religion: the speeches and sermons).

so it's possible to accept that we don't know everything, and that we in fact don't know most things, without having to make up fairytales to fill up the void.

eg when people didn't know where the ocean "ended" they didn't just say "we don't know what's beyond"; instead they made up stories about the edge of the world and the flat earth on the back of a turtle or whatever. nature abhors a vacuum and the human mind panics at the contemplation of zero.

but then again, outside of reason the human brain operates with dream logic.

so i prefer to remain as agnostic as possible, and silent whereof i cannot speak... although maybe that creates high anxiety, because the unknown is hard :lol:

so people choose faith most times as it cures the vertigo. reason and logic are a mere varnish on the bubbling cauldron of the unconscious.

Crusader
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Crusader »

Alphaville wrote:
Thu Jan 28, 2021 10:53 am
Well, of course there is a LOT of stuff we don't know. I mean, dark matter is 85% of the matter in the universe using our physical models! But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't be critical of people who do believe in fairy-tales because nobody can prove them to be false.

You can't prove that I am an alien typing this from another world, but I take it you don't believe I am.

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Alphaville
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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Alphaville »

Crusader wrote:
Thu Jan 28, 2021 11:23 am
But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't be critical of people who do believe in fairy-tales because nobody can prove them to be false.
that's not quite what i'm addressing... i'm saying that your stance is a belief too when you examine it.

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Re: An ERE dating site

Post by Crusader »

Alphaville wrote:
Thu Jan 28, 2021 11:27 am
Well, yes, but it's what I would consider a reasonable belief. I believe that the Sun that I can see on the sky rose today even though I wasn't there to experience it (I was sleeping). (even if I was, I could be living in a Matrix, but I believe I don't).

My problem is with what I consider irrational/unreasonable/whatever belief. I also think that if you are a true agnostic, you literally wouldn't be able to operate because you cannot prove anything, including objective reality. But, speaking more practically, if someone is an agnostic, more often than not, that means they just don't care about the whole topic of religion. But, in that case, I would say that this person is VERY different to myself. I think that whether or not God exists is probably the most relevant thing to my life in terms of influence. If I actually believed that God and Heaven/Hell existed (or some variant of this), it would change how I live my life completely. I don't think I would get along with someone who is simply disinterested in the topic.

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