Nice try, but that post is a provocative thread, designed I believe to engender debate, and does not likely reflect the true beliefs of the OP. Indeed, if you read the entire thread, it rapidly turns into a joke thread, with the occasional insult directed at the OP:
Sage Rat did not even post in that thread. Please try to get your facts straight. In this thread about “should we forgive religion it’s past atrocities?”, Lociran does post:
And from this hyperbole you get to castration and forced abortion? Nice try at a stretch there. Were you hoping nobody would read your link?
Fine. I will be happy to point to the Westboro Baptist Church as an example of a cross-section of Christian groups.
Thing is, the natural disposition of this forum is towards rationality and evidence.
(Right here in this thread people are asking you for evidence to back up your claim, something you have not yet seen fit to do)
Religion, by its own admission, is set apart from that. So whenever it is brought up as an explanatory agent it will get challenged and, as I said before, some people don’t like *any *challenge to their beliefs.
Oh, and the FSM is purely a rhetorical device to show up how shallow most of the claims are about deities in general. Religious people don’t like it for a very good reason, it makes their claims and beliefs look silly without having to attack their position directly.
now take your above example and consider types of post mentioning god.
A) If you were talking about repairing a soft-top and mentioned that you were thanking god for fine weather and the chance to get the top down, no-one would think you strange or call you out on it.
B) If however, you said your serious solution to a broken water-pump was to say three hail-marys then people may well get on your case.
But without you giving us cast-iron examples of what you mean, we can’t even begin to discuss whether your impressions are right or not. If you have cites for people being vitriolic towards the first type of post, then you have a case.
May be it does, maybe it doesn’t, but there’s nothing that the OP himself said to suggest he was anything but serious. Plenty of terrorist bombers and shooters have made their intentions known beforehand and been dismissed as not serious until it was too late; I find it wiser to be cautious in such situations. But even if mutantmoose didn’t actually believe what he said, it’s not something that reflects very well on him.
I do not hate atheists. I disagree with them, and, as I’ve made clear, I find a great many of them constantly engaging in bad behavior, but I do not hate them, and if I ever wrote anything saying that I did, it must have been in a moment of high emotion. As for why obbn is accusing me of being a hateful atheist, the only possibilities I can come up, in descending order of probability, are (1) he’s confused me with someone else (2) he read some of the posts I wrote about ten years ago.
I have some news for you. A vice-presidential candidate is not, get this, not a presidential candidate. At least, not until he or she runs for president.
Are you seriously arguing that a Mormon is not Christian?
These arguments will go nowhere. Atheists technically have the upper end in these arguments in terms of both evidence and reason, but a theistic approach is oftentimes mired in ignorance.
There’s just no good reason for believing in a God, period. We can explain everything without religion, from morality to science to mankind to meaning. What people really hate is when people use religion as a justification for impinging on others (trying to block homosexuality, blocking stem cell research, pushing creationism/ID into schools, justify bigotry and abuse and terrorism, etc).
Dealing with people on the basis of what category of person you think they are is comfortable, and easily justified to yourself. I am a Christian. I am a Caucasian. I am Male. I am an American citizen. I work for the Government. I live in the suburbs. For some people that is enough information for every possible personal judgement they wish to make.
I know a Christian who is married to an Atheist. They are gay, and one of them is a Republican. They are more than demographics; they are people who happen to be decent, hard working, loving, great parents.
How you relate to the people in the world you meet is always your choice, for your motives, and comes from who and what you really are. The same is true for everyone you meet. If you spew out hatred and intolerance it is evil. Exactly which flavor of evil you like of little importance. Believing that God agrees with you, or doesn’t exist doesn’t change it either.
Evil and good have this one thing in common. It isn’t what you think, or what you feel, or what you believe; It is what you do. What you say, of course is part of what you do. At the extremes, what you do not say is also what you choose to do.
You offered that post (and the truncated quote) as an example of an atheist saying believers should be killed, castrated or imprisoned. It says none of those things.
Locrian said that religion should be made illegal and those who practice it should be punished, and in the US imprisonment is the standard mode of punishment for doing non-trivially illegal things.
Really? You are immune from cognitive biases? You made a thread about arthritis pain and rain where you were given the answer that it can be explained by confirmation bias. That’s on the list I linked above along with blind spot bias which you might want to read about. We all have biases, you seem to be conflating that term with prejudice and that wasn’t what I meant or said.
My response had nothing to do with the debate you are describing, but you are dismissing it because you don’t want to face the possibility that your own perception is a factor in the way you react to posts by atheists. I’ll reiterate my point one more time, people attribute negative qualities to someone who challenges their beliefs.
“appears to be so intense” is an interesting expression. When someone challenges your beliefs it is intense to you, not to them.
And, really, that’s just one example. When you think about it, that’s pretty funny, actually. I say people should be left alone and some a self-avowed atheist comes up to tell me that people shouldn’t be left alone to believe what they want to believe, 'cuz one side is, apparently, logically superior to the other (allegedly). But, oh, atheists really just want to be left alone, right? All us religious people are really just being paranoid or something. I mean, 'cuz that’s usually how the line goes, isn’t it? Atheists don’t go out of their way-- especially on the internet-- to feign some faux sense of intellectual superiority. Naw. All of us religious folk really have a persecution complex
Heh, I totally forgot about the “All religious people should be executed” thread, probably because I didn’t take it at all seriously, as my contributions suggest.
In fact, I was ridiculing ITR for taking it too seriously.
Really? When, exactly, did religion make this admission? What is your evidence for this claim?
What is your evidence that some people don’t like any challenge to their beliefs?
As I’ve mentioned already, there are many threads that have nothing to do with religion where atheists inexplicably decide to tell nasty untruths about religion, and then run away when challenged to defend their claims. This is one example; anyone can easily find numerous others. But an example of what you’re asking about might be this thread where Skald asked people about what the defining incident in their life was. I answered that mine was being saved by Jesus Christ and someone immediately began mocking me; no one saw any need to mock any of the other responses.
Yes he did. He claims to have “proof enough to call for an eradication, a banning and penalties”. [Emphasis mine.] A penalty is the same thing as a punishment, so Locrian did say that religious people should be punished. I did not make it up.
