Atheist Bus Driver Trys to Convert Students

[Voyager]

@Budget_Player_Cadet

Mostly to oneself - that this is a reasonable thing to believe, or that we shouldn’t care whether things we believe are reasonable things to believe. Just ignore the phrasing, it’s a lousy quoting on my part.

The point is that this isn’t a harmless belief. Even stripping out all the things that would typically make a belief in any kind of deity harmful - arbitrary religious morality, devaluation of human life, taking easy answers to hard questions that stops us actually finding the real answers, etc. - you’ve still got to deal with the effects that this belief has on your epistemology! Why do they believe that? Is their reason for believing it good? And if not, how can they be sure that this won’t leak through to the rest of the things they believe?

If I said I believed that, and it seems if you said it, it would be a lie since we don’t. In some places I suspect people do lie since saying you believe even in a deistic god will get you in less trouble than coming out of the atheist closet.
My observation is that many of the people who say they believe in this kind of god do, because deep down they are troubled by a purposeless universe. They tell themselves this story to feel better about life. I’m not troubled by a purposeless universe at all, since the horror of the world is easier to take if it is the result of random forces and not a malign deity. Who they convince themselves is actually good.
So I think calling this belief a lie is harsh. The moment they use it for nefarious purposes we can call them on it, but it is not clear if deists are less moral than your average atheist. Remember, Karl Rove is an atheist.
Which proves we’re not a religion, because if we were we’d kick him the hell out of it.

[Voyager]

@Cheesesteak

I see the question of God as being comparable to the question of Alien Life. There is a vast difference between believing that (a) Life exists on other planets somwhere in the universe, and believing that (b) Aliens visited earth, helped build the Pyramids, make crop circles, experiment on people plucked from lonely roads, and are kept at Area 51.

You don’t get to use (a) to support (b).

Similarly, you don’t get to use a vague notion of a supernatural being to support belief in the various stories/commands from the Bible/Torah/Koran, etc. Nor can you equate them when discussing Atheism. It’s unfair to criticize an Athiest whose entire life has been immersed in (and impacted by) the various things God supposedly demands that people do, because their denial of God happens to include a denial of the most inconsequential version of God imaginable.

That’s a great analogy.
I used to have a challenge to those claiming that god must exist as a first cause to link this god to any human religion. No one ever even tried to do it.

[Batano]

So if we call the thing/process that created the universe God, and from that we can conclude that God exists, does that mean if we don’t call the thing/process that created the universe God we can conclude that God does not exist? Cause in that case I think I’ll call the thing/process that created the universe Bob.

[SteveG1]

Maybe after all this philosophical bullshit, it’s time to revisit the premise of the OP subject.

Someone who has some particular denomination of religion, took it upon himself/herself to proselytize a captive audience. To push his/her beliefs on a group of people who are stuck on the bus and so have no choice but to listen.

It doesn’t even have to do with who believes in God. They very possibly, already do. Maybe it’s a Southern Baptist preaching at a bus full of Catholics or Jews or Anglicans. Or an Anglican preaching to a bus full of Jews.
But it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the arrogance of this person, assuming that they need “saving” and he/she is the one to do it. And implying that he/she will tell them what to believe.

And once again, they have no choice but to sit there and listen to it. Even if it was the most (to make a point) “horrifying and repugnant heresy ever uttered by the worst apostate who ever lived”.

[Batano]

Yes, that was the point of me starting this thread. People talk about prosletyzing atheists, but I’ve never seen one try and ‘convert’ a captive audience like that.