Comment of the Week: Religion Sets You Up for Failure
Religion sets us up a failure, punishes people for failing, then claims to have the answers and the cure for the messes it makes.
I see something similar happening with a family I know. Their 20-ish son is dating a girl and the relationship is dysfunctional. All the adults involved note the girl is a damsel in distress and the boy is trying to save her. They are very attracted to one another and hot to get married.
I recommended suggesting to the boy that he might want to try college and not think about marriage until he's gotten a degree. Or suggest trade school or whatever would best suit him--just something legitimate to establish himself into a better position to be married--that will take a few years. If it's love, it will last.
But no, he wants to marry right away!
Surely explaining that love will last and giving him reasonable advice about setting up a good foundation can't be dismissed by the boy. Surely he can understand the need for financial stability and...
Then I'm interrupted and it is explained to me that the boy is adhering to his religious background. Apparently he is not having sex with the girl--because sex outside of marriage is sin.
Now I see the problem. No amount of logical argumentation, no sound advice about setting up a solid life together, nothing I can think of to say will OVERRIDE the fact that this boy is in his 20s, and he is not going to wait for sex any longer. I predict he will be married before the year is out--to a girl nobody can see it working with.
Then, he will be divorced--which I'm sure won't make his god happy, either.
His family claims to want him to avoid this disaster--but they've set up an impossible scenario. The saddest part is that his own father is divorced for the same reason: Married too young, wrong reasons, didn't work, divorced.
It is unnatural for people to repress their reproductive drives for years, especially in the case of youth--where hormones are bound to rage and inexperience is the framework of the worldview.
Telling a boy he can't have sex until he's married is a recipe for a married-too-young disaster. But they all look at the situation as though they can't fathom why the boy is screwing up his future like this...?
Really--it's that hard to wrap a brain around?
He was set up for failure, and he's simply following the path his family laid out before him. His marriage will be disasterous. But short of someone sane going up to the boy and explaining that his beliefs are a load of very bad life-advice that he doesn't have to adhere to...what can be offered to this boy?
My solution would have been not to fill his head with a lot of crap that is sure to make him fail. But fail he will. Then he'll find some way to blame himself--as I'm sure his family will be there with their "I told you so"s to make sure he knows he's responsible.
Then religion will help him patch it all back together and make Biblical sense of it. Religion will get the credit, and he will take the blame--even though religion is to blame, and the boy should get a pass for being an inexperience youth fed lies all his life.
[original post]
Divorce rates for people in the Bible Belt are much higher than they are for any other religious group in America and the divorce rate for atheists is among the lowest. Could this be one reason why? To be fair, it doesn't seem likely that most people with these religious beliefs are quite as chaste and abstinent as their religion teaches. Evidence suggests that they are about as likely to engage in extra-marital sex as anyone else; if they feel more guilty about it than anyone else, though, then this could still be a causal factor.
There was a time when people married much younger and, moreover, that young marriage was necessary. People couldn't be sure that they'd live very long, after all, so religious beliefs like this merely reinforced what people were already doing. Today, however, later marriage is not only becoming more normal, but perhaps more necessary, making these sorts of religious beliefs mal-adaptive in the context of the modern world. This doesn't mean those beliefs will disappear, but it does suggest that people holding them will experience a much tougher time.
Comments
>I predict he will be married before the year is out…
Update–the boy is now married. I have no idea where he’s living or how he’s supporting himself, but I at least intend to send a congratulatory note and some sort of monetary gift to at least show him one person in his circle is supportive of him (I haven’t spoken to him about his choice), and not allowing personal judgments to impede my concern for him and his future–and my congratulations for what should be a happy occasion–whether it lasts or not.
Meanwhile, I received a note from a theist recently trying to explain to me how the problem of evil really isn’t a problem. He accepts god is all powerful, all knowing and all loving–so his god is the god POE eviscerates. He indicated that god sees things like child rape, and god “suffers” when he sees these things–but god, for his part, did what he could by making the child rapist know that he’s not doing a nice thing.
I asked him, then, if this is the moral high road, would he, if he came upon someone molesting a child, not interfere, but simply instruct the molestor that his actions are not correct?
I indicated that if that was his level of moral maturity then he is as depraved as the model of god he puts forward.
His latest reply today included a line that read, “I am a depraved and vile human being. That’s why I need god.”
I’m sorry religion has instilled him with self-loathing. But to be fair, unlike many Christians, he admits that redmeption isn’t necessary unless there is something to redeem one _from_. If people are OK, then what good is salvation?
And who would teach their child as a course of life that they are vile and depraved? Wouldn’t society shun such a parent? Not if they wrap the message in “god’s love.”
God loves you enough to help you out, even though you’re vile and depraved. They may be only small, but I believe the message ultimately sinks in.
Too bad.
One of the big problems of Christianity is its obsession with original sin. No matter how “saintly” you become, you still have original sin because of that mythical event in the Garden of Eden. I was Christian for quite a few years, though a very liberal and perhaps heretical one. I never believed in the original sin bunk…nor the virgin birth, the resurrection, etc. I finally woke up and got out of this archaic religion and dumped the whole thing. Christianity is basically a religion of guilt and dwelling on sin.
It is so sad to me that people take this stuff so seriously and live lives with this guilt. Go to just about any church service and there is a point in the service where the congregation says a prayer for confession of sin. Guilt, guilt, guilt.
This scenario takes me back to the oft invoked Pascal’s Wager, and the fallacious assumption that a theist gains/loses nothing should he “wager” in no gods. Verily, if the strong atheist is “right”, then the story above is one of the most glaring examples of just how much a theist has to lose in erroneously wagering that such a reproachful, bratty god is up there breathing down everyone’s neck. In this case, you stand to lose years of your life mired in a dysfunctional, self-destructive existence. The life you know to be is dragged through the mud for an afterlife life you know not to be.
This somehow seems more topical than usual. For the unforgivable infraction of having unmarried sex, and an unplanned pregnancy, two teens, probably not mature enough to be parents, in reality, are being forced into a “shotgun wedding” for their “sins”.
Their parents are advocates of abstinence only, anti-contraception, pro-life, not to mention anti-choice. How does this serve either teen or the unborn, as yet, child of this forced legitimizing of the liaison?
Of course, I am referring to Sarah Palin’s daughter, another unwitting victim of this misplaced “family values and morality code”. I feel truly sorry for these two teens for what will probably wind up as a bitter, loveless arrangement down the road to a not so rosy future.
I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve seen this happen many times under similar circumstances.
It’s true; the most livable solution in sight for people who are taught they can’t have sex till they marry is to marry early. I’ve been there, and it’s maddening to be holding out in your twenties, with great expectations from one group of people you love (family and Christian friends) and suspicion of being an immature fanatic from another (other friends and peers). I know of very few people who preached abstinence to me who had actually experienced it, and I can say from my experience that it’s lonely and difficult–not without a few great rewards, but an incredibly isolating experience. It is less and less realistic to expect people not to have sex when they’re hitting puberty earlier (at least girls are, in general; I don’t know about the boys) and are expected to get married later (the ever-increasing importance of a college education to get oneself started in a career).
Traditional religions set people up by convincing them that they are morally inadequate, when their only serious fault is a lack of smarts. The concept of “sin” is based on the concept of “weakness”. It is the human condition, period and requires no religious improvement. Most people are naturally trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly etc.
This is very close to what happened to me. I was a christian. My mother fundamentalist. I got my girlfriend pregnant accidentally due to a birth control malfunction. Well my Mom guilted me into marrying her with her talk about making things right with God and the fact that I was living in sin and such and on. I was 20 and it was a complete disaster.The entire time. I married someone I didnt want to, because I was told I had to to make it right with my all powerful imaginary friend. I am divorced now, it was messy and painful and VERY expensive. My dad, an atheist, told me post hoc that he knew it would be bad. I asked him why he didn’t say anything? “Because you wouldn’t have listened.” Maybe not, but if he had been talking to me the whole time. It probably wouldnt have happened. I was too young. I was broke. And I had no idea what to do to make it a good situation. But I have a son now that is awesome. I spend a lot of time trying to teach him virtues, ethics, and critical thinking. Hopefully the painful lesson I endured he may bypass.
And by the way. I tried for years believing that God would fix it. That the answer to my troubled marriage was in my religion somewhere. But we looked for answers in science(psychiatry and psychology) with nominal to moderate success. My marriage counselor took me aside and told me “I don’t like to say this and I don’t usually. But you need to split up with her.” She did not believe my wife could get over her problems. I believe she can but she doesn’t really want to. She blames everyone else. I went from blaming my parents and god to blaming myself. Now thatI know I am responsible for my situation I feel SOOOO much better about myself. I know that I can make decisions that will change it. I dont have to rely on some magic guy I that may or may not help me depending on his whims.
Your last paragraph covers a lot of the problem. For the first time in history people and women in particular are marrying at a late age. Previously girls married as soon as they were mature enough to be having babies. Girls role in life was to be married, to be a mother and housewife. They would not have had to endure a lengthy time of sexual denial. Being able to have a sex life as a single person allows individuals to take their time about marrying so they don’t rush into inadvisable unions.
Not being a religious person I don’t think of premarital sex as sinful but it does require a sense of responsibility. Also in the past the prohibition on sex outside of marriage was not only because it was regarded as a sin against God but because a daughter might end up pregnant to an unsuitable partner from the parents point of view. Since only the daughters could become pregnant that led to the hypocrisy sons sowing their wild oats while the daughters were locked up.