You are not getting away with this. I’d like a cite(that would be a link) to this group’s website, or a mention of this group from another source. Which Portland University they appear at?
For bonus points, try to guess what city I am posting from, and what groups I happen to be affiliated with?
Oh bullshit. None of the soldiers on the ground made the choice to continue the Iraqi war. Thanks for wishing for the death of friends and family, asshole.
I’m afraid that every soldier on the ground makes the choice to continue war. That’s what war is-one group of soldiers fighting another.
I’m talking about the higher ups making the decisions-you honestly think the average ground soldier decides these things.
The average ground soldier makes the decision to become a ground soldier. He knows what being a ground soldier encompasses. He knows what he is told to do. He knows what the consequences are for refusing to obey orders, and he weighs them against the direct consequences of his obeying them.
Then he decides.
Are they Borg ? If not, then yes, they made a choice. And while there are consequences to saying “no, I refuse that order” or deserting, those consequences are less than those they inflict on their victims.
And how many of them voted for Bush ? How many joined after the war started ?
Why should I care about the friends and families of such people ? Do they care about the friends and families of the people they kill or help to kill ?
Only because there are more religious people than there are non-religious people.
What does this have to do with how annoying the non-religious zealots are?
Because organization affects how successful they are at being annoying, or dangerous. A lone zealot yells at people, or burns a rival church, or shoots a few individuals. Organized zealots get passed oppressive or ridiculous laws, slaughter villages full of unbelievers/heretics/infidels/whatever, or pilot planes into skyscrapers.
But Politics are necessary.
Reading through the thread I wanted to mention that this is a great article. Thanks for the link. I’ve spent some hours on this board talking about and thinking about the things he expresses. There are a lot of areas where believers from different belief systems and non believers experience things in a similar way and operate in a similar way. We tend to let labels and terminology create chasms between us where with a closer and more nuanced look, we’d see those similarities.
Atheist zealots are still annoying.
All things being equal…they ain’t. There are so few atheist zealots out there that you actually have to look for them(or follow MissTskTsk’s lead and just make them up), whereas you can find mention of organized groups of religious zealots of every religious persuasion in the news almost every day. It’s like saying that 1=1000 because they are both numbers.
IMO the reason such comparisons fail is purpose. The IPU, FSM etc. etc. are not linked to anything meaningful within human emotion and psychology.
God belief , and/or other religious beliefs are connected to humanities sense of purpose, belonging, love, right and wrong, justice, and so on. These are real and important facets of our humanity. Certainly religion is infused with superstition and religious myth and for some the myth may be more important than loving their fellow man, but I think it’s impossible to separate believers into groups that value myth more, or true service and purpose more. There are too many levels of nuance for that.
Can we talk of love and justice and other ideals without speaking of religious beliefs? Of course, and I hope that believers and non believers could find that common ground. To that end the teapot and similar arguments serve no purpose and ultimately have no realistic comparison to god belief.
So you’re saying that atheist zealots are not annoying because they are outnumbered by religious zealots?
This is all little more than special pleading and does not actually explain why belief in Yahweh, the son of the Canaanite El is a more reasonable thing to literally believe exists than the IPU. Emotional connections are not arguments for existence. They’re also not exclusive to the Abrahamic God. People have had (and continue to have) equally emotional connections to Krishna, Rama, Kokopeli. Earth Mother goddesses, Zeus, Odin, Ancestral spirits, animals and trees. Most western theists have no problem with rejecting any of those things out of hand as ridiculous.
But emotional connections and appeals to personal morality have no reference to the conversation. The assertion that god exists is not empirically different from the assertion that the IPU exists. Values and emotion are irrelevant to the comparison.
No, I’m saying that claiming atheist zealots are annoying, then backtracking and saying that all zealots are of course equally annoying, is disingenuous at best. Millions of things can be classified as “annoying”, but atheist zealots are so damn rare that I find it difficult to believe that they are a constant annoyance to anybody. It’s like bitching about stubbing your toe while you are running away from a madman with an ax.
Thats a very specific belief in which someone decides they know their deity’s attitude toward you. I have a problem with that as well. That certainly doesn’t include all believers.
bolding mine
That’s an interesting way of putting it. Has you entertained that idea that perhaps you just revealed a non religious spectacular moron?
Can you think of any examples where people believed something most people thought was absurd ,and with no proof, only to be shown correct later on?
Can you think of examples of every day common human interaction where we accept things as true without proof?
I’m not sure what an atheist zealot might be so I won’t accuse anyone of that. On this particular subject you seem pretty opinionated. Fine. Mine is that you’re confused about what intellectual integrity and reason really are and you just can’t see it.
IMO intellectual integrity and reason allows us to see the nuances and subtleties in an argument like this. From the nature of your posts in this thread they seem to escape you. Am I wrong?
This does not address my question in the slightest.
Why are you so threatened by the idea that there exist people who find atheistic zealots annoying?
Are you now trying to tell me that voting for Bush is somehow deserving of death?
Are you saying that no one, ever, any time, should join the military?
As for the topic at hand-let’s face it, it’s not religion, or lack of. It’s humanity. Humanity is scum. Human beings, no matter their beliefs, are assholes.
In the past, the Crusades, colonialism, the exploitation and atrocities in Africa and Latin America, etc, were fueled equally by greed and racism-religion often being the excuse. “Saving the savages” took a backseat to stealing their resources, making them slaves, treating them like animals.
And if or if it hadn’t been religion, it would be something else: I said it before-Humanity sucks. Humans, by and large, are evil.
We’re all assholes-you’re an asshole, I’m an asshole, every individual in the world is an asshole.
Threatened? No more threatened than the OP and you are by atheist zealots in the first place. I am merely disagreeing that they are so common as to merit special attention. They don’t leave booklets in phone booths and on bus seats. Despite spurious claims to the contrary, they don’t follow people around trying to convert them. They don’t hold rallies in public squares. They don’t spend millions trying to legislate the morality of others. What do they do?
On a message board dedicated to finding out what’s what, a board so dedicated to getting to the facts of the matter that the one word response of “Cite?” is common, they refuse to give one aspect of the supernatural a buy-religion. Even on this board there a so few people you would classify as “atheist zealots” you could probably name them from memory. This is why I question the supposed “annoyance” of atheist zealots.