Condescending and Rude

On one of the breaks at that debate I was participating in, a lady approached me and a friend who were chatting about nothing in particular. She started out by heading in a really fuzzy way towards what I eventually picked out as the notion that morality requires an external authority (otherwise it is anything-goes relativism).

So I explained that yes, subjectivism/relativism was definitely not desirable, but that she had bought into a false alternative and one could indeed have an objective morality sans subjectivism/relativism and independent of God/religion. (If she had read the Preface to my talk that I handed out there, she might have noticed that I called out rejection of this false alternative as precisely the sort of thing that ought to catch someone's attention as something they don't expect and likely worth trying to understand -- I listed a handful of that sort of category-buster to try to pique interest.)

Dropping that, she gestured to how, as she listened to the exchanges of the evening, she felt sorry for guys like Rob and me. You know, I really should try to get into the habit of brightly replying to condescending stuff like that with something like, "Thanks -- I feel so sorry for you, too!" Very Miss Manners.

Rob had spent a lot of his period working over the notion of his having a hard time believing these fantasic claims even after sincere, long and hard work. The claims seem arbitrary to him, and it would be a mistake to believe them. She referred to that and started explaining that belief in the Christian system is more than just intellectual assent, that it also requiring something akin to submittal.

She went on to say that Man has a fallen, rebellious nature, and so she sees my problem as being unwilling to submit because I'm rebelling against God. My first response was to laugh that she should speak for herself on being a fallen, rebellious brat. I quickly pointed out the plain logic that I can't rebel against something I'm not even aware of. She didn't seem to follow that, so I picked a handy example and asked: speaking of submittal, is she rebelling against Allah? (I'm told Islam literally means Submission.) No, she admitted, because Allah doesn't exist. So I suggested the parallel: She can't rebel against Allah because she doesn't recognize His existence (there's nothing to rebel against)... And I can't rebel against her god because I don't recognize it's existence (there's nothing to rebel against). So we're even, right? No dice, they seemed like totally different cases to her. Sigh.

Despite my being the world's single greatest authority on the thoughts in my head, and even explaining that it was logically impossible for me, she insisted on psychologizing with something like: "Deep down, when you are all alone, you can hear that quiet voice inside admitting you just don't want to submit." Hoo, boy. That's when I explained that most would consider that quite offensive, that it would be like my saying to her, "Deep down, when you are all alone, you can hear that quiet voice inside admitting you are insecure and afraid to face reality as an adult, putting away childish things like imaginary friends." Even if true, it's both rude and unhelpful to toss that sort of thing out.