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Do individuals relations need to be so strongly hyphenated with the zeitgeist. With individual relations, everything is negotiable.
Just talk to them. Make your boundaries known without having an explosion. Tell them in clear words that this behavior is not acceptable. Be ready to erect boundaries if need be. Talk to your wife before you do anything. Ideally, she will take care of it for you.
That being said, I struggle to make sense of people who are logical about everything except religion. Not so much about the existence of God or the social technology that is religion. I mean religion as the arbitrary yet oddly specific rituals that can make or break your entry into heaven.
It is one thing to delude yourself for comfort or to believe in the social value of religion. But, to live in a world of Science in 2023 and to think that the specific sub-set of rules outlined by your pastor will get you into "Christian heaven" is some proper hypocrisy. By definition, if these people believe in the power of these specific rituals to get you into heaven, then don't 99% of all living humans go to not-heaven. (hell?). Even if these in-laws are right, then surely a place where 99% of people go after death, can't be THAT bad.
I know, "2005 called, they want their Christopher Hitchens rants back". But still, do these people never reflect on what they believe in ? Even for a moment ?
I find people who are unable to fathom how an intelligent person could be a Christian have often never engaged with any Christian apologetics, and often don't even really know any Christians in real life. I think Christianity is false, but I don't think you have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to believe in it.
I can agree that they're not stupid, but willful ignorance? Absolutely.
A God that doesn't do anything else except set up a clockwork universe and then fuck off and never intervenes where anyone can see it isn't an entity worth worshipping.
Cue apologetics about how if God was obvious, then there would be no need for "faith", which is absolutely howl-worthy when you consider how convenient it was that there were clear and obvious miracles right up till the point we could properly document and examine them.
That is willful ignorance, for all that they're drinking their own kool-aid. At some point a rational entity who hasn't fucked their own priors sees that an explanation without a million epicycles that reduced to God doesn't really do anything is better stated as God not existing.
The variant that persuaded me actually came from the Atheists, who asserted that a God who attempts to secure your love through threats of eternal torture is a monster. That seemed like a pretty good argument to me, along with the obvious-when-you-think-about-it point that if a God existed, and if he wanted us to know he existed, we'd simply have the unalterable knowledge baked in. Of course, if we knew for a certainty that he existed, then the promise of heaven and the threat of hell would be dispositive, even if Hell is the absence of God and a choice we make, etc, etc. On the other hand, if God existed, and wanted us to choose to love him of our own free will, the only way that works is if we get to choose whether or not to believe in him as well. In that case, leaving his existence plausible but ambiguous makes perfect sense, together with Hell as the absence of God and a choice we make, etc, etc. It fits even better if you presume annihilationism is correct, and the people who reject God get exactly what they're expecting: death, and then non-existence.
In any case, the chain of logic seems simple: God wants to share love with people. It's not love unless it's freely chosen. The choice is permanent, and the choice being offered is better than it not being offered. Certain knowledge of the consequences of the choice corrupt the free nature of the choice. Given those constraints, blinding the choice is the obvious way forward.
It seems there are a few pages stuck together here, linking "can choose whether to believe in X" and "can choose whether to love X".
Also, at least in the variety of Christianity I was taught, God doesn't threaten people with eternal torture. He simply gives people what they want for eternity: if that's to be without him, then so be it, and so they end up in a torturous existence by their choice - hell is simply a place where humans, angels, and perhaps others exist without God or the fear of death, which is all they need to create a terrible existence by their own efforts. I'm not a Christian, but like a lot of Christianity, this seems to be to be insightful and plausible in itself. It certainly makes far more sense than an all-benevolent, all-powerful God setting up a realm of eternal torture for fallible beings, and (for some insane reason) hiring a fallen angel to run the place.
That's no God then, that's an Asshole Genie.
Not sure about that: is it being an Asshole Genie to not force someone to love you and want to be around you?
If someone makes a prideful wish, should a genie revise that wish to something smarter?
The asshole genie thing is that God should know very well that rejecting religion and not worshipping God does not actually mean you wish to be away from all that is good in the world - you simply don't believe that the good things are all absolutely reliant on him.
Going "oh so you want to be cast into the outer darkness" is a cheap gotcha rather unbecoming of any deity that claims to be all-loving. "Oh you don't want broccoli? Well I guess I won't feed you at all."
Taking it further, this idea of the nature of Hell necessitates that God either isn't all-powerful so he physically cannot embrace those who rejected him, isn't all-knowing so he doesn't realize that people don't interpret their wishes as he would, or not all-benevolent so he doesn't give a fuck and would rather cast them into Hell out of spite for being wrong about his existence.
I see it as more "a sensible wish based on the information I have".
Here, I think opinions among Christians diverge, but some options I have heard are (a) the choice is post-mortem, but without the spiritual development and accepted Grace from worshipping and believing in God in this life, the chances are that the Devil is going to persuade your wicked soul that hell is a better option, (b) the idea that everyone really believes in God, so to reject Christianity (or the closest thing you can do in your cultural context) is actually to knowingly reject the highest good, or (c) to think that salvation is available even for those in hell, except perhaps those explicitly said to be damned in the Bible, i.e. Satan and the fallen angels.
I think that some combination of the three is probably needed to fit with the Christian belief that their religion is not, in fact, just a very successful twist on a set of unusual religious practices that evolved among a particular tribe in the Levantine regions, and that the reason why Jesus was geographically so limited (covering just a tiny and somewhat peripheral region of the world) was that he was just a particularly successful example of the many mystics in that period, not some inexplicable mix of divine and human. As you might expect from my wording, I actually believe that it was such a lucky twist, and that Jesus was an unusually successful (and wise) mystic.
Another option, which I haven't heard from Christians (except perhaps some Catholics and Evangelicals - my memory of those particular conversations is hazy) but which makes sense to me from their perspective, is to take "God = the highest good" really seriously and Platonically, and to take very seriously what the New Testament says about worshipping being about what you do rather than what you say or think. This allows them to intepret e.g. John 3:16 as a sufficient rather than necessary condition for salvation. So, someone who pursues the highest good they can conceptualise and know in their particular circumstances is experiencing God's grace and accepting it, even if their historical circumstances etc. mean that they can't be Christians. I like that idea, insofar as I think (despite being a moderately gnostic atheist) that pursuing the highest good(s) one can conceptualise is the best route to a meaningful and happy life, and that the world could be a lot better if more people did it.
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