Struggling with Catholic Partner

[Aractus]

I'm a 41 year old single Dad in Australia and 6 months ago I fell in love with a 40 year old single Mum. It's been a whirlwind honeymoon period for the both of us since then and we love each other heaps and both feel that things feel just right, but recently, a recurring topic keeps creeping into our conversations that we can't seem to get past. - Religion - When religion makes it into the conversation, I can't seem to (and don't want to) back down on my personal view that religion is a myth and I find myself in a 'Richard Dawkins' mode where I'm trying to disprove religion - but the response is always the same. "you are disrespecting me and my views" - and so the conversation ends with a stalemate and not a happy ending.

My partner is Catholic and is very involved in her big Catholic family and associated religious gatherings and is also a teacher in an elite Catholic school here in Sydney.

I am quite the opposite. I'm from a small family, non-religious, quite passionate about science and enjoy a robust debate and question the status quo.

Hello Paul,

Catholicism is, unlike Protestantism, very deeply rooted in tradition - similar to Orthodoxy and to Jewish people. Even non-religions Jews feel a strong connection to their culture and heritage.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people get deeply offended if their mythology is labelled as "myth", their beliefs span 40-60,000 years - considerably longer than the Roman Catholic belief system.

Roman Catholics, which as a Christian I always found well strange, continue to believe myths taught by their tradition, even though they've been long-since disproved. One of them is the authority of the Vulgate (and consequently the LXX), which was a decision made at the Council of Trent, and a belief shared by the Orthodox church - see this blog post where it is obvious the poster is willing to completely ignore modern scholarship on the issue, just so his church's teachings about the LXX remain "correct".

In addition to ignoring modern old and new testament scholarship - or selectively selecting what modern biblical scholarship to listen to - they also deny the legitimacy of other historians and archaeologists - many of whom are bonafide scholars. So the real problem is that people who have sensitive cultural or religious beliefs often feel that they (or the authority/community they belong to) have the exclusive right to know and interpret history, or as Neil Silberman puts it:

"There is no difference whatsoever between Scientific Creationists (who twist every possible bit of empirical evidence to show that Darwin MAY be wrong and that the world COULD have been created in seven days 6000 years ago), with those fundamentalist biblical hardliners who INSIST that every single word of the Bible is inerrant, divinely inspired and that every historical story it contains is as reliable as a news report in the New York Times– no, sorry– the Fox News Network."

And as Larry Hurtado (a very highly respected NT scholar) puts it: "people have a right to their own opinions but not to their own 'facts'."