More and more lately ‘friends’ of mine on Facebook have been posting Bible quotes, mentioning their connection with God and/or Jesus, and comments that (to me) seem to clearly indicate they wholeheartedly feel that they are better for having Jesus in their lives than someone who doesn’t. I, 98% of the time, don’t make any comment or acknowledge these posts. It is their facebook and their faith, they should have the right to express it.
Then when the shooting happened the other day, I made a post that ended with stating that Sarah Palin posting on facebook that her and Todd would be praying for the victims and for justice, was literally the least she could do. This led into over twenty of my friends who have never communicated with each other going off about my post. Any reference to my atheism was taken as an insult against the three born-again Christians defending themselves endlessly. Even my friend Charles, who I respect immensely and is a defender of atheists and gays, went off the deep end and stopped politely and logically talking to me. He declined into a state of accusing me of telling him he was “just another bigoted Christian.” Two of the three have since defriended me. Where does this hypocrisy come from?
I don’t see it as hypocrisy–just people taking offense needlessly. Palin is the one being a hypocrite, and you have a right to voice your dislike for her because of it. Unless your wording was poor, they have no reason to assume you were calling all Christians hypocrites.
Then again, if you said what you did in the title of the thread, I could understand people misunderstanding you. The word tolerate can have some nasty connotations when you direct it at a person.
Just like with conservative Islam, any denial of their faith by others can be seen as an insult.
But then, I’ve seen spouses (usually the wives, but not always) do the same thing to each other. One expresses an opinion, the other disagrees, and world war 3 breaks out in their household because the one with the opinion demands that ALL SUBMIT TO MY OPINION.
Actually, I can understand someone taking offense with your Palin remark.
I’ll give Sarah and Todd the benefit of the doubt that they sincerely believe in the efficacy of praying, and presumably your religious friends do too. Sure you can disagree with them, but your snarky comment (if you related it accurately) could easily be construed as an insult to their belief in prayer.
Maybe people overreacted, but you weren’t blameless in provoking them.
It’s not clear to me at all that she deserves the benefit of the doubt. Palin has no apparent morality, from getting knocked up before marriage, to constant lies about death panels, to quitting her job half-way through the term. She probably just talks about prayer to manipulate her fans so that they continue to vote for her and spend money on her books.
But how can even devout Christian’s honestly believe in the efficiacy of praying? People pray about everything all the time and bad shit still happens on a constant basis. If it worked why would we even bother with the brain surgeons? Just put the patient in a corner and have everyone pray for her, that’d do it! I would suggest that even Christians (the non-crazy ones anyway) know that praying doesn’t actually achieve anything. It’s something that people do when they either can’t do anything useful or (in this case) can’t be bothered / don’t want to do anything useful. It’s the option of last resort.
There are plenty of useful things that Palin could be doing to reduce the vitriol in public discourse, but she doesn’t want to do those. So she’s ‘praying’ instead.
And of course expressing a disbelief in payer is provocation, while a belief in prayer is just normal.
Can you imagine sending out a Xmas letter saying stuff like:
“Bill and I are thankful this year that our lack of belief in God has benefited us. We have more times for walks on Sunday mornings, not tithing has allowed us to donate money to the needy, and our understanding of the world is more profound when we realize it required no creator and came about through natural processes”.
But every year Atheists get letters full of tales about how God has blessed families because Billy’s team won their football game, or Aunt Bessie only had one leg amputated instead of both. Should we be up in arms because the letter writers “reject our beliefs”?
But whatever you think of the Palins, if somebody says “I’ll pray for you” and you respond “That’s literally the least you can do,” you’re not so much insulting the person doing the praying but the prayer itself. That’s the thing that got folks upset, I think.
It sounds to me like the Christians got upset because thy thought the OP was denigrating the efficacy of prayer. Well, too bad for them. Others are not ethically obligated to believe in religious superstitious or magical chanting rituals.
Well, if they said that after targeting me with a gun sight on their facebook page, I wouldn’t be impressed by their completely insincere promises to ritually chant to their sky god for my recovery.
Nah, that’s not what I’m saying. Steampunk Willie could have stated that he doesn’t believe praying will accomplish anything without mocking those who think otherwise. He chose mocking (and maybe I would have too in his shoes).
I happen to agree with Willie’s opinion, and some people deserve a good mocking. But the fact is he did mock, and what I’m calling out is his “who, me?” attitude when people got upset over it.
He was essentially mocking the Palins for saying they would pray after having previously put out a virtual fatwah on the victim, but these sound like the kind of overbearing bores who could stand a little mocking anyway.
It seems like once a week we see people complaining about facebook friends spamming them with unwanted political or religious drivel, yet they never seem to want to drop them as friends. I’d drop them like a hot potato. In fact, I have done just that with people I barely knew in high school sending me “Obama is teh antichrist” crap.