Oh? I ruined a pitting of Der Trihs by flaming Der Trihs? It’s funny how you have this idea that any attack on any religion is an attack on MY beliefs and is going to make ME cry. Nope, I just took the opportunity to call a few morons morons. Hell, I only mentioned one moron by name and his name is in the thread title. The other morons chose to self-identify.
You might stop to realize that you have issued a classical ad hominem response to a perfectly lucid (and far more polite than you deserve) question, and from someone NOT named PRR or DT or any other name you think sufficiently derided around here to give you a free pass from answering the question.
This website, in allowing people to post freely and openly about their religious beliefs (assuming their religion is deemed to be mainstream) without facing the barrage of polite questions, slightly less polite questions, and finally derisive mockery (progressively, as they refuse to answer the questions or provide authoritative cites) is bending over triple-backwards to apply a double standard to Christianity that it proudly refuses to grant to other belief systems. You want to testify that “God is good”, but don’t want to answer simple questions such as “Can you prove that there’s a God?” or “Can you please explain why so much evil is tolerated for so long by such a good God?” without undergoing mockery by people who find your answers weak, self-serving, illogical or inadequate? Well, luckily, you’ve come to the right place, because the SDMB, despite its clearly stated mission of fighting ignorance, will allow almost any number of nonsensical responses in defense of Christian beliefs, while protecting Christians from the derision their responses deserve, banning some atheists, chastising others for harassment, “trolling,” etc.
All I’m asking for is that the SD treat Christianity like any other system of belief, and allow skeptics to pile on the derision, mockery, contempt that KGS has richly earned in this thread, and that Scientologists and Zeus-worshippers receive whenever they attempt to defend their loony systems of belief, but that will never happen here, and will not happen until we’re much more highly evolved than we are now. But should a Christian be ridiculed for affirming his beliefs? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, until he grasps the offensive and harmful nature of those primitive beliefs. We’ve outgrown religion but still live in its oppressive clutches.
Oh, we’re talking about Absalom. I would not call him an unrealistic character, just one whose faith is not on the same level as other religions. Based on my indirect experiences with other people who believe their pets talk to them, I believe this is a reasonable assumption. While I wouldn’t claim I know everything about their worldview, I would feel confident in assuming that it is shallow and limited, and like Malthus said, more likely to lead them down the primrose path. Oh, and I don’t see what being able to summarize one’s faith in one single line has to do with anything.
In otherwords you feel like you should have the right to abuse people with impunity for seeing things differently than you do?
Why do to deserve a less polite reply?
Oh, so it’s the format of an online message board that you don’t like, because you can’t reach over and slap the stupid people. I know exactly how you feel.
You keep talking about this double standard that is applied to Christianity, but you have not yet explained to my satisfaction what it is (this must be what it’s like for the atheist who tries to get a theist to define God). From my vantage point, Christianity gets the same treatment on the SDMB that Judaism, Wicca, and even Satanism get. There just happen to be more Christians. That’s what happens when you have an international board based in the United States.
This happens all the time in any thread in the Pit where religion gets mentioned. You’ve participated in a good deal of them, so I wonder why you pretend it doesn’t happen.
Also, for someone who claims to be the head of an English department at a prestigious university, you sure seem to have a hard time understanding that ridicule is not the best way to convince someone that your argument is right.
To be fair, he also didn’t know that a phrase like “dumbass motherfucker” is an idiom. He thought and presumably still thinks that it’s an instance of hyperbole when applied to someone who you think is a total idiot. I wouldn’t really be surprised that he doesn’t realize that ‘unrestrained invective’ isn’t a particularly useful rhetorical strategy.
Even if he’s not lying and he really is a professor, he’s about as qualified to educate students who’re native speakers of English as I am to teach fish about swimming.
This assumption is based on what? You feel confident in assuming that you’re better than he is, but what is it based on? You keep coming back to your assumptions: Christianity is reasonable and Dog-ism isn’t because you feel that Christianity is reasonable and Dog-ism isn’t. And then you can’t understand why atheists can’t see a difference.
I think this whole thread must have been dogged by the Dog-ist.
Hail to the puppygod.
There are very real differences between the two.
To start with, there’s the basic dynamic between religiosity and insanity. If you talk to God that makes you religious. If you think God talks to you, that makes you insane.
There is a kernel of truth behind the insulting comparison of religion with Son of Sam style lunacy, in that the worst of the worst religious folks really do have an attitude like “God said it, I believe it, that settles it. Now I’m going to go blow myself up in a crowded marketplace.”
But as has been pointed out, most sane people contain numerous ‘judgment levels’, and can decide for themselves whether or not to follow their religious leaders/holy books on all things. Some Catholics use condoms, after all. Hell, even people who believe that the Bible is the complete, direct, unaltered word of God don’t actually do everything it says (as a quick read-through of Leviticus or an experiment as to how many fundamentalist Christians will turn the other cheek if you punch them, will demonstrate).
The difference, in a nutshell, is that the dog-worshiper hears voices which don’t exist and acts on them pretty much unquestioningly while the vast majority of religious people read texts which do exist and listen to words from religious leaders who do exist, and then pick and choose amongst those as to what exactly they accept and what they do not.
Just because, from an atheist point of view, belief in God is equivalent on an objective level to to belief in any other mythic being… that doesn’t mean that the fruits of all beliefs or the actions of all believers would be interchangeable at all. Scientology is vile and without redeeming graces. Moderate Christianity can be a powerful force for good in a community.
What’s the difference between my imagining there’s a woman in my living room that no one else can see and my imagining there’s a woman in the living room that no one else can see and she’s talking to me?
That’s a false analogy with religion, unless you find a religious person who believes that God has a corporeal form and He’s sitting, invisibly, in their living room.
It’s the difference between having the aesthetic gloss that Universe is ultimately a good and right place whose creator wants us to be righteous and to treat us other decently, and believing that your pet dog is commanding you to do things.
On the edit: honestly, it seems as if many of these analogies offered up are designed to be as insulting and as full of straw as possible. I don’t agree with religion. I have been an atheist since I was 12 years old. But I can understand that just as there can be agnostic a-theists, there can be agnostic theists. And most importantly that believing in various Ultimate Purposes behind reality is an aesthetic and not an epistemological issue. And, of course, that someone who has a different aesthetic than I do isn’t on the same level as a suicide bomber or the Son of Sam.
No, it isn’t a false analogy to say that if you believe in the existence of a person who can’t be seen, believing that invisible person is talking to you is perhaps a degree weirder but not on an entirely different weirdness scale.
If you think God can hear you, thinking you can hear him ain’t so strange. The first step’s the lulu, not the second.
Yes, it is a false analogy because I doubt you can find many, if any religious people who conceive of a deity as a person. I’ve had rabbis explain their view that God is goodness/love/unity. Period. Full stop.
As well as saying that the Bible is a collection of “sacred stories” and weren’t directly inspired by a divine power let alone directly penned by God.
That isn’t in any way analogous to a belief that an imaginary person is talking to you.
Let’s say we’re not even talking about an agnostic theist, but someone who honestly and truly believes in the power of prayer.
In that case, all they know is that they’re thinking something and that they believe it’s reaching a Higher Power. While atheists can and will believe that to be fundamentally incorrect on ontological grounds, they should (if they’re intellectually honest) admit that there’s nothing that’s actually delusional that’s going on. At least, not any more ‘delusional’ than a parent who sends letters off to a son or daughter who’s a soldier in the field of battle, and the parent doesn’t know for sure if the child will be alive or dead when the messages get to them.
Belief in a God or gods, in an of itself, is not a delusion as long as one admits that it’s based on faith and not scientific proof.
It’s a far cry from that to claiming that religion is all analogous to hearing voices. Religion isn’t fungible any more than faithful people are fungible. Religion also isn’t a brand of insanity any more than religious people are a type of crazy.
The first step (especially if we’re talking about agnostic theism), is fairly minor. The second step, that of hearing voices, is an actual mental disorder. We shouldn’t confuse the two simply to score rhetorical points.
Touchy, touchy. In fact, both the dog listener and the religious person, if true to their respective faiths, are taking instructions from a source not rationally screened. If you truly follow the word of God, whatever your interpretation of it is, you clearly must put aside your moral filters, since God’s command must trump your human understanding of morality.
I’m not claiming that most religious people actually do this - in fact, quite the opposite. In fact religious people get their morality from “atheistic” sources - their family, their cultures, the law. They then interpret their holy books in the light of their cultures. Most religious people (in fact close to all) are far more moral than their god. That’s why the same passages in the Bible get very different interpretations over the years.
No doubt the guy in my example is doing the same thing, and won’t hear the dog telling him to do anything he wouldn’t do already. But the danger is if there is something deep inside him that isn’t very nice, it might get acted on because the belief in the voice of dog trumps his moral filter.
We can extend the analogy by imagining some sucker who starts believing in the dog, and who will follow orders transmitted by the person from the dog. Because you never ask questions when dog’s on your side.
I’ll stop right there and say that I believe you are wrong.
Ummm, I’m on your side of the debate here and all, but there was this Jesus person… You know, that whole trinity thing ^^;
Indeed there are similarities. It’s folks who claim that they are identical in all respects that put a bee in my bonnet.
Yeah, but he aint around anymore.
To be fair, (and to account for the inevitable Doper Nitpickery 
) I should have said that very few, if any, religious people conceive of their deity as someone who would, right at this moment, adopt corporeal form and sit down to a cup of tea with them. That even the Trinity conceives of Jesus as being an entity in the non-Universe realm of “heaven”, and not some actual figure who might sit in the room with you.
And to get this into the concrete, rebels in the Congo at one time were convinced - by faith - that a charm would make them immune to bullets.
The thing the people offended by this analogy don’t get is that in real life very few religious people would listen to dog or god when something they consider immoral is being said. Deep down they know better than to trust the word of god as it has been propagated. They retreat into the amorphous “god is spirit, god is the universe” stuff, which has the advantage of no holy books spouting evil nonsense.
I never said I was better than the Dog-ist, although I apologize if my somewhat condescending tone seemed to imply it. It’s hard to maintain civility when debating with a group of people who think you’re either nutso, or worse, scum of the earth.
My worldview differs from the Dog-ist in that its first principles are more fleshed out, go a longer way towards explaining how the world operates, have a longer tradition, and a stronger community. Yes, at the end of the day, faith is faith is faith, but again, I insist that there are some obvious differences between a Dog-ist and a Christian.
Imagine you went to a party. At the punch bowl, you meet a man who is Catholic. While waiting in line for the bathroom, you talk to a man who is a Dog-ist. Are you seriously claiming that all things considered equal, you would feel the same about both men?