I agree with you; but my point wasn’t about simple belief. My point was that if you are going to be passionate about something, whether it be to despise something, or to witness something, you should have more than a little knowledge about it, IMHO.
ultress, now here’s an “uncalled for comment”: you are smart and wise and belong in this thread.
Whoops. I meant fuck off idiot.
RexDart wrote:
Spiritual experience is testable as well. See Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D, the chapter titled “God and the Limbic System”.
Op. cit.
An inference from insufficient data is a logical fallacy. Thinking that your own experiences are definitive for all people, that what you know defines what others ought to know, and that what you’ll learn is what can be known — these are epistemological obstacles. As someone whom you respect, I recommend that you shed them. 
Well obviously I’ve been reading your thread, maybe you should re-read it. We seem to be reading the same thread in a different light. You see it your way, and I see it the way dopers are posting in response to you.
Newbies are so cute!! They don’t miss a thing and SO original.
Better, but still not in par with the rest of the pit. Slow response, no originality at all. IQ too obvious, but there’s hope and you are learning.
You said this in a thread you started?
Hmmmmmm…
Regards,
Shodan
I’m usually outclassed in threads about religion, so I don’t post much in them, but this one comment Cisco made is something I’d like to remark upon.
People respect your beliefs because they want their own beliefs respected. It’s that golden rule thing. Do unto others and all that. If you truly respected your girlfriend, you wouldn’t make fun of her religion to her face. You’d respect that her beliefs are different than yours, and that while you don’t believe in them and can’t, you can understand that she can and does believe in them.
I don’t believe in the Hindu religion, but I’ve known plenty of intelligent people who did, and not only would I not tease them about their strongly held religious beliefs to their face, I wouldn’t even mock them behind their backs.
True respect is thinking high enough of someone to not want to hurt them.
I think you’ve just summed up some pretty good points about respect!
Cisco?
Perhaps you’re equating “not respecting” with “not sharing.” If that’s the case…stop. They’re not the same.
I respect your beliefs, in that while I don’t agree with them, I don’t think you’re an idiot for believing that way. I feel that you have the right to believe the way you do. However, I do not share your beliefs.
Here’s an example from personal experience:
I have this friend. I’ll call him D. He’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had, ever, in my whole life. One of those friends that I’d bury bodies for. No, I’d do the killing and the burying for him, so he wouldn’t have to dirty his hands.
In your MPSIMS thread, I mentioned that I’m a Pagan. My aforementioned friend? SBC. Southern Baptist Conference.
We’ve got a lot in common, including a respect for each other’s beliefs. Never in a million years would I try to tell him he’s wrong about what he believes. And he’s never tried to tell me that I’m wrong about mine.
That’s what we mean by “respecting her beliefs.”
Now, you’ve got to figure out what you mean.
Persephone people tell me I’m wrong for my beliefs all the time. I mean, look at my location, I live in the bible belt. Hell, some of my friends even have a favorite saying for me - “You’re going to hell.”
It doesn’t bother me. They say what they believe and tell me I’m wrong, I say what I believe and tell them they’re wrong. There’s no hostility there. We’re still friends and we still like and respect each other without liking or respecting each others beliefs.
The same goes for my girlfriend. We love and respect each other, we just don’t respect each others beliefs. She thinks that there’s someone watching over that she can talk to when she’s having a hard time, I think there’s not.
I really don’t think it’s that huge of a deal and she doesn’t either. Maybe sometime in the future it will become more of an issue and we will have to make some sort of compromise or something but I’m not going to ruin a good thing now because of something that might happen in the future.
One thing I’ve learned from this and the MPSIMS thread is that if my girlfriend was half as uptight as some of you people we would’ve broken up a long time ago.
Then you don’t share the same beliefs. There IS a difference.
We’re talking semantics here, Cisco.
If you don’t respect each other’s beliefs, then you simply don’t respect an integral part of what makes each other the people you are.
You said that, Cisco. Sure, your girlfriend’s beliefs in Christianity are fair game. But so are your non-beliefs. In other words, you want to “jokingly” call her family Advent gift-exchange a “cultic ritual”? Then don’t even think about being honked when she tells you that “Jesus loves you.” You want to be intolerant and disrespectful of her beliefs, then be prepared to take intolerance and disrespect of your own from her.
Okay Cisco, I’ll try to talk real slow for you:
Can you see the contradiction? Is it still fuzzy for you?
You say you can’t respect any person who is Christian.
Yet you claim to respect your GF, who is Christian.
Any questions?
Cisco, one of your ongoing themes seems to be that you think you ought to be able to treat your GF like you do your friends. Giving each other a bad time, thinking your friends’ beliefs are dumb, etc. is much more OK than it is with your GF if you are planning on building a life together. Disrespect is not a good foundation for a marriage. You talked at first about raising kids together, you seem to want to be serious with her and be thinking about marriage, lifetime commitment, children, whathaveyou. (And have you asked her about that? She may like you to date, but not be thinking of you as marriage material.)
You cannot treat a life partner in the same way you do a buddy. When you have a wife, you can’t disrespect her beliefs and think she’s gullible. You have to be willing to stand by her in what she believes–not to think the same, but to support her in what she wants. You can’t mock her opinions when both of you know that you really mean it underneath and really do think she’s wrong and stupid. You have to be willing to defend her to others. You have to treat her so that she can respect herself for being with you. Posting on a public message board about how you can’t stand your wife’s religion is not a cool thing to do (you can get away with it about someone you’re dating, but people won’t think much of you).
I’ll say it again; someday your GF is going to figure out that disrespect of her beliefs=disrespect of her. When she decides that your contempt of her religion outweighs the fact that she likes you and wants to please you, she will most likely be pretty upset. It takes a while to realize this, because you so obviously like her very much and want to be with her, but she may feel that your love is not worth the price she has to pay in her self-respect.
I used to be her, you know, and I used to date you. It took me a while to figure it out too. I feel dumb now for putting up with it for so long, but it’s hard to see sometimes when there’s so much lovey-dovey stuff in the way. Love without respect, however, is not enough for a marriage. My ex-BF and I are both very glad now that I broke it off–we’ve each found people who are much more suited to us.
Okay, in order…
The greatest commandment is that you love the Lord God with all your mind, heart, and sou. The second, like that, is this: You must love your neighbor as yourself.
I am giving you a new commandment, that you love one another.
By this, all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love among yourselves.
Nothing. Pilate went out to the Jews seeking to release Jesus.
Let you who is without sin cast the first stone.
This is all I can do from memory, I can post the actual scriptures in a while if anyone needs them, but I will need to look for them.
Since I have nothing else to say here, I cede the floor to who ever wants it. But no Fundie Crap!! If your going to defend a faith, whatever faith it is, do so with a little class…
“sou” = soul
the last “your” = you’re
It’s late and I’ve been drink’n 
But she’s like, my best friend.
I’ve never asked her but she brings it up to me semi-often.
Gonna have a[nother] looong talk with her about all this tomorrow. You guys are scaring me into thinking it’s a bigger issue than I thought it was…
NoClueBoy
You got 4 out of 5. (The first one is a toughy.)
It’s weird…I think I’ve gotten nicer and more intelligent posts over here in the pit than I did in my MPSIMS thread.
I still don’t quite understand why repsect for beliefs is a prerequisite for respect for the person though. I just can’t wrap my head around the concept that a person and a person’s beliefs are not two different things.
Try to imagine revering a baseball player if you have absolutely no intrest in baseball. It just…doesn’t matter to you. Other people may get all excited and emotional about Mark McGuire or Sammy Sosa but you just don’t care. And then a crowd of people come along and say “HEY! You should respect Sam Sosa goddamnit! That man hit more baseballs than anyone else in history!” Well, you just don’t care though. Does anyone follow me here?