Stardate 20020725.1259

(Captain's log): In response to yesterday's post about religion and divorce, Raymond writes (with my interspersed comments):

Your recent objectivist reflections on the benefits of religion in creating a peaceful society and in establishing lasting marriages are starting to get dangerously close to an empirical justification of Christian faith. What pulled me up short in reading your entry today on marriage was the realization that your own opinions mirrored mine so closely until the birth of my daughter nine years ago.

"Objectivist"? Bite your tongue!

Seriously, I'm a mechanistic atheist but I'm not a capital-L Libertarian and I'm damned well not a follower of Ayn Rand. It's hard to really say that I "follow" anyone, actually, but if I had to say who has inspired me, I'd have to list Bertrand Russell and John Stuart Mill.

I made my comments about the benefits of Christianity because there's a perception that militant atheists have an agenda of trying to stamp out all traces of theism from our culture to convert everyone else to an atheist. There do exist atheists like that, but I'm not one of them.

Most of what I perceive as the positive aspects of Christianity have the ability to manifest when it is present in our society but dilute, distributed, divided, where no single version of it dominates and where there is no societal or legal pressure on anyone to be Christian unless they want to be. Which is more or less the situation in the US right now. In such a situation, any person can seek out the faith which best serves their needs, or not be part of any if they so choose.

Most of what I perceive as the negative aspects of Christianity (or any other religion) manifest when a single faith comes to dominate in a society. At that point, like all other human institutions, it begins to become obsessed with power and control and empire building; it begins to interfere in areas I don't believe it belongs, and it starts trying to use its muscle to coerce non-believers into either becoming believers or living by the precepts of the church even if not a member, and in particular to trying to suppress other religions. The most extreme manifestation of that in recent memory was the Taliban, but a study of history makes clear that religious authorities will usually try to manipulate temporal events if they think they can, and various Christian churches have a long and glorious history of such behavior.

I'm referring specifically to your presumption that your own happiness in our out of a marriage was the paramount concern and the only really valid measure of a marriage's success. I have read your blog with some consistency of late but don't profess to know anything about your own personal life as a consequence, thankfully, of your own reticence.

I keep running into this. It seems to be widely accepted by Christians that atheists are hedonistic, and selfish, and that the only thing which is important to them is their own feelings and their own happiness and be damned to everyone else. Like any other generalization about a group as diverse as atheists, it's possible to find people who are like that, but most are not, and I'm not. I never said that my own happiness was of paramount concern.

I consider happiness to be good. As a general principle, I think everyone is or should try to be responsible for their own fate. But I like making other people happy and I myself get a good feeling for doing so. With respect to marriage, what I tried to say is that I don't think that a statistic indicating that there have been a lot of divorces necessarily means anything.

In a legal sense, a marriage is a legal contract between two people. For most Christians, on the other hand, that's less important than the fact that a marriage is a bond between those two people which has been sanctified by God. (In some faiths, there's a belief that there's actually a linkage created between their souls.)

Equally, to me a "marriage" is an emotional bond between two people, and ideally it makes them both happy. When I see two people living together without a formal license, I still think of them as being "married" because the bond is there. About the only important difference is that if they decide to split up, they don't have to go to court.

Marriage, whether legal or informal, is a "good" thing to me because it makes people happy. The extent to which it is "paramount" is proportional to the extent to which it makes people happy. When it ceases to do so, it is no longer a good thing.

Still, I think I can say with near certainty that you do not have children of your own. Once you've had children your own desire for personal happiness is secondary to that of your children and rightfully so since you largely create the world that your child inhabits.

Given that I've never been formally married and have never had children, I do not claim to be an expert on this subject. I have my own opinions based on what I've seen in the relationships of friends, and in close analysis of my own feelings. But if I, or anyone, claims to have the final answer on this then they're lying; it's just too complex.

Again I'd like to emphasize that a desire for my own personal happiness is not primary now, nor has it ever been. And I'm well aware of how wonderful children are. I'm