(November 15, 2021 at 10:00 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Oh, I didn't critically think my way out of christianity. Common misconception, lol.
Have you ever had the apprehension that dissonance in the context of your being gay and your parents purported beliefs manifested itself in the status and content of your relationship with your parents? I know that alot of people have a similar experience to the one where you described where they can't reconcile their nature with their deontology and so they find it more difficult to believe that deontology. I'd say that a parent having the same problem and finding it difficult to believe in or accept their child's nature..instead..is the same process, just forked the other way, as you put it earlier.
I find it difficult to believe in and accept my own child's self professed gender issues, and do something similar...it's entirely accidental that the focus of my own firmly held beliefs isn't as shitty as people who belong to a hate group by any other name. Still, it seems like a ting that we can apply to any party in either situation and even in comparison, despite the difference in and between parties in the two situations.
That's more the kind of thing we're talking about when we talk about dissonance. Not things pushed to the back of mind - things which can't be, and so, create discomfort which might manifest itself any number of ways until it's resolved. The last parts the tricky part. What genuine resolution can be arrived at when, for the sake of argument, reality is in conflict with a firmly held belief? Not all of which can be in the box of shitty beliefs, not all of which are absurd, not all of which are poorly argued for or poorly justified.
I would never have guessed you had or were having these sorts of issues yourself.
Using your definition of cognitive dissonance - things that can't be pushed to the back of the mind - I guess you could characterise my relationship/dynamic with my parents, particularly my dad, regarding both atheism and homosexuality, as avoiding cognitive dissonance... since everything gets swept under the rug. I feel uncomfortable talking about my dad directly like this (and therefore preferred to keep it vague), because I do love him and I know he does love me, and outside of these issues we get on very well, but we just know that it will always end in tears if we confront these issues head on... so for the most part, we don't, or if we do, only in little steps. Put it this way, nowadays we can watch a comedy together which covers a gay issue, and unlike before, the whole room doesn't get unbearably tense and awkward.... so I see that as progress, small, but I'll take it; I don't see his overall view ever changing but he has mellowed a little at least.
And on the issue of atheism, oddly enough I get more resistance when I talk about Buddhism than atheism, which doesn't even involve the concept of a god - or at least not the type I was interested in... there the potential cognitive dissonance seems to stem from the massive difference in philosophy, ie of Buddhism teaching you to be self-reliant and Christianity teaching you basically to be reliant on God. Vs with atheism (I know the Buddhism I'm talking about is also atheism, but you know what I mean) I guess that's just another thing that can easily be swept under the rug in the sense of saying, 'one day he'll get it' (I guess both of us are hoping that of the other). Another oddly enough, is that this whole interest in the Five Ways has actually acted as a little bit of a bridge between us... allowing us to talk about religion on a fairly neutral ground, without the attendant defensiveness or whatever, since his faith is not based on or reliant on those sorts of arguments.
Anyway, as to you, how did you come out of Christianity then, if it wasn't critical thinking? And with your child do you have the same sorts of issues of sweeping things under the rug? It's always been a bit of paradox for me, on the one hand, confronting things is possibly a good thing, but on the other, neither me nor my dad are people who like to fight for the sake of fighting. I don't think there's anything I could ever say to change his mind, or vice versa for me, so in that sense, what's the point? Because on the issues of atheism vs Christianity, we just speak a different language and have no common ground... ie psychology vs superstition... albeit with a new potentially common ground coming through the five ways, ie logical rather than emotional arguments for God. Not saying I'm trying to argue for that, but it's just a welcome change to be able to actually discuss these things.
