Honestly while I’m secular myself, this stance would lead to me politely refusing a second date.
Yes astrology is daft, but most of the things you and I believe are daft too or at least only locally true and culturally constructed rather than globally true. I don’t care if someone is religious or secular, what I do care is to what extent they believe humanity can know unfiltered truth in the first place. This is a much more important and useful axis in my view than whether they are religious or secular.
In my view no human can know direct truth, they are forced to rely exclusively on the unreliable narrator of their senses and for this reason I don’t trust people who make excessively confident claims about the nature of reality at all, whether religious or secular ones.
This isn’t the ‘gotcha’ you think it is. I could just as well ask the fedora fanclub how they respond to someone saying ‘bless you’ when they sneeze. The point is there are local truths and there are global truths, and you don’t have undistorted access to the latter. None of us are playing with a full deck.
To use your own example of fiat money, we all know it’s a society-wide fiction but it is kept up willingly and enthusiastically for the reason there’d be a very non-fictional economic meltdown if we didn’t do that. We are pretending a small-t truth is a capital-T Truth for practical reasons alone. The danger comes when we forget we’re doing that and mistake our aggregate belief for reality itself in my opinion.
I cannot stand people who think they are personally exempt from this kind of thing; people who insist their imperfect senses give them full and perfect access to objective truth. These kind of people are dangerous whether they’re religious or secular, I would much rather date a superstitious person who was aware most of what they believe is vague and wooly than someone who calls themselves a rationalist and makes these massive sweeping metaphysical judgements about things.
your premise here is that real things aren’t real.
good luck with that. all I see here is something trying really hard to feel they are ‘one up’ on other people because they have mistaken skepticism for reality.
Honestly while I’m secular myself, this stance would lead to me politely refusing a second date.
Yes astrology is daft, but most of the things you and I believe are daft too or at least only locally true and culturally constructed rather than globally true. I don’t care if someone is religious or secular, what I do care is to what extent they believe humanity can know unfiltered truth in the first place. This is a much more important and useful axis in my view than whether they are religious or secular.
In my view no human can know direct truth, they are forced to rely exclusively on the unreliable narrator of their senses and for this reason I don’t trust people who make excessively confident claims about the nature of reality at all, whether religious or secular ones.
So when you buy a coffee do you lecture the cashier about how ‘culturally constructed’ money is, or do you just pay them?
This isn’t the ‘gotcha’ you think it is. I could just as well ask the fedora fanclub how they respond to someone saying ‘bless you’ when they sneeze. The point is there are local truths and there are global truths, and you don’t have undistorted access to the latter. None of us are playing with a full deck.
To use your own example of fiat money, we all know it’s a society-wide fiction but it is kept up willingly and enthusiastically for the reason there’d be a very non-fictional economic meltdown if we didn’t do that. We are pretending a small-t truth is a capital-T Truth for practical reasons alone. The danger comes when we forget we’re doing that and mistake our aggregate belief for reality itself in my opinion.
I cannot stand people who think they are personally exempt from this kind of thing; people who insist their imperfect senses give them full and perfect access to objective truth. These kind of people are dangerous whether they’re religious or secular, I would much rather date a superstitious person who was aware most of what they believe is vague and wooly than someone who calls themselves a rationalist and makes these massive sweeping metaphysical judgements about things.
your premise here is that real things aren’t real.
good luck with that. all I see here is something trying really hard to feel they are ‘one up’ on other people because they have mistaken skepticism for reality.
I’m sure that sounded clever in your head
Bold argument from someone whose worldview is entirely reddit-tier pop science and affected rather than earned rationality.