Depends on what you mean by morality. I was dating (believe or not) a devout Greek-Orthodox woman for a while in 2006 who claimed that my atheism didn’t bother her, but the notion of pre-marital sex and how traumatic it was for her without her Bishop’s blessing broke us up. Essentially, a disagreement over morality, I think, no?
You really do have a million of them, don’t you. 
Religion seems to have touched your life quite a bit, it seems.
First, you dated a devoutly religious woman?! :eek: [deletion of bad taste joke]
As far as your example of morality, I think it falls under the exception* of those acts which are huge areas of contention. I’ll list some of them; abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research, right to die, capital punishment, pornography, and I’ll add pre-marital sex (although not all/many religious people adhere to this one so it wasn’t on my original list, admittedly).
That’s not a huge list given your contention that religious and non-religious people’s thoughts are so vastly different.
*and I didn’t make this exception up after you posted either. It’s there in the original post with the request.
Why does the issue being in “huge contention” matter ? The fact that, for example, so many believers disbelieve evolution or think that God wants them to persecute homosexuals doesn’t make them any more right, morally or factually. Nor does it reduce the harm they do.
You’d have to go back to the chain of thought. No one is claiming anything about the level of harm that Christians do or don’t do.
Zoe is claiming that you generalize too much about Christians to be accurate, and that you think that Christians are living in the dark ages. ivan astikov counters that since Christians live by a 2000 year old code, it virtually makes them be living in the dark ages. So I noted that given that’s it’s a 2000 year old code, it still works remarkably well for our time, except for a few contentions of morality.
prr posted that he saw more differences than similarities in terms of worldview. So now I’m trying to get him to give me an example of these huge differences of morality that don’t fall in the few areas of contention.
Actual quotes of this summary follow: (I love multi-quote)
OK, I’ve read most of the posts on this thread: apologies if I’ve missed anything but I don’t think I have.
I think most have missed the point of the OP. The OP is saying that some posters on the Dope who are religious adherents are using a rhetorical trick called a false equivalence to make it seem that there is some kind of balance between religious adherents in the US and atheists in terms of offensiveness and bigotry, when there clearly is no such balance – religious adherents are much more offensive and bigoted, in general, than atheists. Frex, Fred Phelps is an extreme and hateful bigot, while Dawkins, generally presented as an example of an extreme atheist, is clearly not hateful nor a bigot.
The proper way to settle the argument would be to examine some of the posts that make this claim. The OP chickened out and said they did not want to debate particular posters’ points: I find this disingenuous in the extreme. There shoulda been some cites.
H&R, it seems simpler (and truer) to agree that your “few issues of dispute” seem to me to be many and serious, and let it go at that. Just pre-marital sex, which is the cornerstone of my belief system, is sufficient for me, and as you say, there’s plenty more.
I think Evil Captor is on to something here–this is an interesting OP that has gotten hijacked several times. I’d like to either follow it up, if possible, or open separate threads on the various hijacks if we’re not going to discuss the OP further. We haven’t really begun to discuss it at all.
Gee, I wonder why that is…maybe it started when you began intimating that making an effort to NOT be an asshole about atheism is “weak and it’s cheap it’s mostly despicable.”
It “works” to the extent that nominal Christians ignore it; much of our progress as a society has been about discarding those barbaric “values”. You can be a good person, or a good Christian; not both. And the places and times they don’t ignore it, are those that involve the “huge contention” you don’t want to talk about it.
Perhaps, Der Trihs, in your rabid hatred of all things religious you are unaware that there are Christians who do not persecute homosexuals, and even support homosexual rights. You seem insistent on treating all Christians as a monolithic group who all believe exactly the same things. Yes, there are Christians who use that 2000 year old code to justify things that are harmful to others, but there are many who realize that times change and that their beliefs must change with them. I know many people I consider to be good Christians who condemn the actions of those Christians who choose to spread hate instead of love.
…and therefore, since there has to be at least one Scientologist who isn’t a major league douchebag we can conclude that people need to stop referring so negatively to Scientologists.
-Joe
I haven’t read the whole thread (still cruising somewhere in the middle) but I wanted to comment on this…
Wrong, PRR. You don’t speak for “everyone,” and you definitely don’t speak for me. And of course you’re smart enough to know that very basic and obvious fact. So were you just trolling?
Cuckoorex, I wouldn’t describe myself as a “theist,” but it was very funny that I was already having a good laugh at this thread when I read your post to say people were probably laughing at this thread. However I’m not laughing because atheists don’t agree; I’m laughing at the very arrogant atheists who presume to know the behaviors and motivations of everyone (theists AND atheists), with whom they happen to disagree. It’s ironic that atheists claim to have a particular affinity for logic, but don’t realize there’s nothing logical about making purely speculative and broad claims about a group of people in order to discredit and dismiss their perspective. Claiming to know how all atheists feel (or SHOULD feel), is what I would think also damages the atheist cause. And isn’t one of the most off-putting things Christians do is to question whether others can rightly call themselves Christian when they don’t agree? (I also laughed at PPR for going there in post #11, LOL.) In my view those are the types of things that cause atheists a loss of credibility, at least for me.
And FWIW, I also totally disagree with PRR’s idea that you(Cuckoorex) should leave the thread. So I vote that you stay, yes.
Well, almost all Christians ignore the part about being nice to their slaves since almost all Christians don’t have slaves, so does that make all of those Christians nominal Christians? Then that makes all Christians who don’t have slaves good people, yes? Despite what other beliefs they have? I’m still unsure about what makes a good Christian in your eyes.
If you think I’m painting in black/white, you might want to re-read your post.
No, but if you made a wide-sweeping generalization about ALL scientiologists. you’d be inaccurate. . . unless that particular wide-sweeping generalization were true. . . like they’re all humans.
Could it be sarcasm? :dubious:
It’s been known to happen around here. I’ve seen it now and again.
Of course, straight-arrows like me generally would have no occasion to encounter such things.
Can someone point me to where Dawkins has come across as some sort of spittle-frothy lunatic? I’m asking honestly; I’ve only read The Ancestor’s Tale and found it delightful and understated.
I understand the need to be sensitive, but when you’re taking a logical position, you have to follow it to its logical conclusion wherever it goes, even if that means stepping on some toes. Ultimately, religion means at some level you’re choosing not to see the world as it is. If that hurts people’s feelings, then so be it. No need to get nasty about it, though.
I do have a problem with Der Trihs. I believe that not every discussion of religion and spirituality is reducible to whether religious people are genocidal lunatics, yet he’ll drop in and beat that drum in threads where more nuanced conversations are taking place. If he had a blog I’d read it and might even become a fan, but I don’t appreciate that kind of disruptive threadshitting.
And they would come under the category I specified, of Christians who ignore their own religion. They are good people - and therefore, bad Christians. Rather like being a Nazi; you can be a Nazi and a good person, but only by being a bad Nazi. And yes, I do think that comparing Christianity and Nazisim is fair; Christianity is just as evil, if not worse. Especially since Nazism was such a very Christian movement. It’s just that after the last century or so it’s grip has become so much weaker. It’s followers have been forced to pretend to be civilized by governments and a populace who won’t let it run wild anymore.
No, I don’t; in fact I referred to different attitudes among Christians in the very passage you quoted. You are arguing against a straw version of me; just as believers tend to argue against a straw version of Dawkins, and atheism in general.
In other words, just as I said, "much of our progress as a society has been about discarding those barbaric ‘values’ "
Spreading hate instead of love has always been one of Christianity’s central values; that’s how it got to it’s present position of power. It’s the hatemongers, the killers and oppressors who represent Christianity’s core values, who have always been it’s champions and leaders. They are not the ones abandoning Christian values; it’s the ones who try to do good in the name of an evil religion who do that.
Sarcasm? :dubious:
::checking again::
Nope, still looks like trolling.
And of course your username clearly confirms your “straight arrow” disposition. 
Well, as long as you’re sure.
Hey wait, they’re not like tomndebb. . . they’re not a couple!!
Oh my GAWD, that’s NOT what I was thinking!!!:smack: LOL
That username… gosh, I admit I have trouble figuring out while a guy would have that username. (you are a guy? right?) And I have often chuckled while trying to come up a reason that you chose it.
But so far, I got nothin’. 
Hilarious!
Well yeah, I’ve often wondered that myself when people think I’m a guy. What guy would name themselves a cutesy name like mine. And I guess they just don’t notice or they’re left wondering.
But I don’t have that problem–the reason I named myself that was because I think it’s cute, I was watching the movie just before I registered and because I’m 100% female. I know I don’t debate like a girl, but I do most other things like one. 
I think this statement pretty much sums up why I find your rants against religion so annoying. You can’t differentiate between religious beliefs and the things that people do in the name of their religion. Irrespective of whether or not there is a God, all people who believe in God are not hatemongers. You insist on ascribing the actions of some of those who espouse Christianity to all Christians; you point to evil things that some people have done in the name of religion and claim that it was their belief in God that caused them to do them. Has it ever occurred to you that it may be the hatemongers, killers, and oppressors who have abandoned the core values of Christianity, or that they may be fanatics who would do these things regardless of their “religious” beliefs, and only use religion as an excuse?
No; I just don’t follow the common practice of pretending that people who do bad things in the name of religion are doing so in spite of, and not because of that religion. The norm is to credit religion for people’s good behavior, and lay all the blame on individual people for their bad behavior even when they are following their religion’s commands.
And I specifically said the exact opposite, that not all are. Apparently you just want to lie about what I am saying instead of arguing against it.
Because it DOES. Because their religion demands it, and they follow those demands. Do you have any reason to believe otherwise, beyond an insistence that it just can’t work that way ? That if they do bad things, it MUST have some other cause than their religion ?
When people SAY they do things because of their religion, when their religion says that they SHOULD do those things, and especially when they have no other reason to do so - why SHOULDN’T I take them at their word ? Why should I assume that they are lying ? You, of course want to assume they are lying, because that’s the only way you can shift the blame off of religion.
No, because it’s nonsense. As I just said, hatred and killing and tyranny are HOW Christianity got where it is today. And in many cases, their fanaticism wouldn’t motivate them to “do those things anyway”, because without their religion they wouldn’t have any motivation to do so.
My comparison to Nazism wasn’t accidental; Christianity is much like a successful version of Nazism, one that succeeded in massacring it’s enemies and converting others by force, and then a thousand or two years latter mellowed. And at that point, people like you would emerge, and try to claim that the people who wanted to oppress and kill in the name of Nazism were perverting it, that Nazism was really all about love and peace. And you’d completely ignore history in the process.
Christianity is, and always has been, at heart about hatred and oppression. You can pretend otherwise all you like, but that won’t change reality.