Magical Sky Pixie, Etc. -- Y'all Know You're Being Deeply Insulting, Right?

The BBQ Pit
101

Jesus People! You take it right up the nose everytime.

The argument was, “Please don’t use MSP (or similar name calling) to describe God (god) because it’s rude.” The whole point of this thread (despite it being in the Pit) was a Doper was upset about terms.

I don’t think the real issue is the literal MSP, it’s the tone that MSP is usually used. If I called God (god) the bearded white man on a throne no one would say a thing (very few that is.) If however I said, “Do you really think God is just some silly bearded white man on a throne” then my tone is the problem, not the description.

FTR, I see nothing wrong with calling God (god) the Magical Sky Pixie. Nothing. The term is cute if anything if left out of a sentence. But as the links pointed out people very often use MSP to demean and taunt others, which is in fact rude.

The other side is that it is also rude to answer a question by saying that, “The bible says so” or that “well you’re going to hell then”, or many other such sayings. That is also disrespectful whether you’re religious or not.

102

To address the OP, however briefly -

The first time I saw MSP I thought it was vaguely amusing.

At no time since then have I found it amusing, because of the almost inevitably childish way it is used to mock a poster’s belief. Often, it’s unnecessary to the discussion at hand, and does nothing but annoy/offend those involved.

It is well known that I’m neither a Christian nor a Jew, but I wonder how posters like Poly, Jodi, zev or CMK feel about their god being referred to in this fashion when I see it. I worry that these good people will be offended by such a reference. Clearly, some of them do.

That said, for some reason “the big beard in the sky” does (mildly)amuse me. Probably because it always brings back the illustration of god in the children’s bible I was given many moons ago. Which is not to say that I want to see it supplant MSP; surely we can have more respect for each other than that.

103

I don’t care WHAT you call my diety in the Pit. You can say MSP all you want in the Pit.

Bringing it up in GD is what pisses me off.

I didn’t not say NYAH NYAH NYAH myself-I said grienspace was using that tone. I told him to get over himself.

My Jesus Christ on a Stick was an expression, and it was not used in malice.

I do NOT care if you call dieties MSP-hell, if someone worships a God and wants to call that God MSP, that’s FINE.

But don’t use it as a term to MOCK OTHERS.

104

Um, have you read about Lenin’s purges of the church during the Red Terror?

Perhaps their policies were only a “by product”, if you will, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t horrific and done based on what people believed.

On 2nd read, phil, you were referring to my barb at Lib. Fair enough-perhaps it was uncalled for.

105

Jodi -

Some atheists do it precisely because it gets a rise out of believers. For those, you are just feeding the flames.

Some people are believers because of well-thought-out reasons. Others are so because of non-rational or irrational reasons - force of habit, early training, psychological quirks, God knows what else.

Atheists are no different. Some have well thought out reasons, others became atheists first and looked around for reasons later. Some are reacting against early training, and some have psychological quirks. I have often thought that Madlyn Murray O’Hair was a militant atheist simply as a way to piss as many people off as she could, and in an atheist, left-wing society, she would have been the head of the Moral Majority, just to get the same reaction.

But some fundamentalist believers and some ‘fundamentalist, evangelical’ atheists are what they are as a way of dealing with their own inner demons. Do you think Fred Phelps is as loud as he is because of the strength of his religious convictions? Do you think Stalin persecuted the Church because of a settled conviction that religious belief was an illusion?

It is nearly a truism of the debate about gay rights that some homophobes are reacting against their own sexual desires. It is equally a truism that some fundamentalists are trying, by shouting down those with whom they disagree, to silence their own inner doubts. Can anyone doubt that there are atheists who are equally trying to shut down that echo in their head from an abusive or indifferent figure from their past, who did what he did to them at least partly in the name of God?

Please understand that I am not accusing any member of this board specifically. But I do not understand you.

If God does not exist, clearly He cannot be insulted by your references. And it seems rather clear that the Magical Sky Pixie and other dismissive references are meant to be insulting. Who then are you trying to demean? God, who you claim does not exist, or your fellow Dopers, who do? Your references are either making you appear silly, or abusive.

In neither case are you going to do any more good than the most rabid snake-handler in creation.

It is too similar to the confession of the Islamic atheist:

“There is no God, and Muhammed is His prophet.”

For the record, I am not particularly enthralled by MSP or IPU references, nor do I find them all that offensive. Just more of the static that one has to wade thru to get to real debate, and to be used to gauge how serious the debater is about sticking to the argument. Sort of like the obligatory mention of the manifold evils of religion as an argument against its truth, and the obvious counter-argument of, say, Martin Luther King or William Wilberforce.

You want to dismiss my beliefs with perjorative terms, and hope it will piss me off? Feel free - I have the traditional counterblast.
I will be praying for you.

Regards,
Shodan

106

We atheists need to treat the beliefs of theists with the same respect that they treat our atheism.

107

Beautifully put, Revtim, as long as that treatment is on a per-theist level, not across-the-board.

And now for one of my favorite poems:

There was a great Marxist named Lenin
who did two or three million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in,
but where he did one in,
that grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

Whether or not they were specifically persecuting church members, I think it’s undeniable that their ideology was a materialistic, atheistic ideology. And I remember hearing something about people in glass houses, and I wish my fellow atheists would stop throwing the “You people commit mayhem” stone at decent theists.

Daniel

108

I never use the terms MSP or IPU, but I do often refer to god as “the Absent father in the sky.” I do not do this to offend anyone. I refer to him that way because that’s how I see it. If there is a god, and I’m not holding my breath, he’s absent from our lives. I know many of you disagree with me on that, but that is my opinion.

IMO, I don’t think any of these terms are really offensive, or degrading, but then again I’m not a true believer. I will probably continue to use “the absent father in the sky,” as that expresses my opinion about god in the most precise terms I know.

109

Once again, I’d like to restate the question that I, and Erislover, and most recently Amok have asked in this thread:

Why does your religion deserve any more respect than the thousands of other strange claims that people make with no evidence whatsoever to support them?

110

Not so fast, gobear! [Groucho] I love my cigar, and I’ll take it out when I please. [/Groucho]

I would put it this way: (1) their atheism was part and parcel of their political ideology, which amounted to a secular religion. And (2) the millions they offed were those who they regarded as heretics, apostates, or otherwise insufficiently pure in their devotion to the True Communist Faith.

Sounds completely analogous to Christianity’s wars, only here, people were dying at the hands of an atheistic faith-equivalent.

111

Holy Crap! I inspired (albeit indirectly) a Pit thread!

Heck, I even got the t-shirt!

You’re right- when I first wrote that, I WAS being derisive- some asshole had expressed HIS derision of MY choice of belief by vandalizing my truck. I was, ah, a little hot. I don’t normally refer to, um…

Hey! What should we call that thing you Christians worship?

G(g)od? I personally find THAT to be insulting to my very lack of belief- it’s not like it’s his name, it’s more of a title. I don’t think he exists, so why should I grace him with a title?

G-d? Whenever I read that, I hear “guh…duh”- hardly flows trippingly off the tongue, you know?

Jehovah? It’s nice and antiquated, and puts him on par with Zeus, Shiva, Santa Claus… All, in my opinion, mythological beings.

How’s that?

112

Pretty good. I almost makes sense, especially coming from Austin, Texas.

113

You have a problem with me, fine. You seem to care less about the things you say to me personally, but please don’t go around telling people as you did in
this thread…

…just because you don’t agree with their beliefs. There’s quite a few grown, rational people here who I think would disagree with that and think it’s disrespectful. I sure do.

114

By this am I to take it that you do not, in fact, see any difference between reining in derision for the sake of people you know it might pain, and granting respect to their beliefs?

Do you see this difference, or don’t you? Hlep me out here.

115

What, MrV, like the claim that there is no deity? :slight_smile:

Well, I could go around making fun of atheism and atheists, but I don’t. Courtesy, mostly. Same reason I don’t refer to Joseph Smith as “that small-time con-man” every time someone mentions the LDS.

The way I see the rules of courtesy is this: if someone makes offhand reference to their religion (or their atheism, or whatever), you act polite. If there’s a discussion of their faith, but they put in all the right qualifiers, stressing that they believe X, and the consequences of that are Y and Z, then you act polite, and you debate within the stated assumptions if you’re gonna debate.

But if they say “X is true”, then you can pull out all the stops. By asserting the truth of their faith, they have opened its truth or falsity up for debate, and you can take it on with whatever weapons are forum-appropriate.

The funky thing here is that atheists seem to be quite comfortable in asserting the rightness of their nonfaith and the wrongness of belief of any sort in this thread, where that wasn’t even the subject. And in the other threads Jodi linked to as well.

Folks, you are welcome to believe that the Christian God, or any other god, is a Magical Sky Pixie. And if I tell you that God is real, you should feel free to tell me so.

But this is all very 1970s, this business of “if I hold back on anything I’m thinking, I’m being less than honest, and that trumps any rules of polite conduct.” It won’t be a moral failure on your part not to say “God’s a lie” everytime God or Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Wicca or whatever is mentioned. You really can save it for those situations where the truth of theism or atheism is at issue.

I’m certainly not proposing any board rules here, and the whole “Magical Sky Pixie” thing doesn’t particularly bother me anyway; my God’s a big boy, and He can take a bit of teasing. This is more Miss Manners territory than anything else - if someone gets a haircut and they haven’t asked you what they think of it, you don’t go up to them and ask them what kind of small animal pelt they put on their head. Same difference here.

116

I don’t think this is the point the OP was making. From what I understand, Jodi is asking if you are aware that mocking other people’s faith by using MSP is in fact offensive.

You’ll notice Jodi didn’t demand to cease using MSP. She just asked that you consider who you offend when using MSP. Obviously, you already know that MSP is deeply offensive to some people, and you have no problem with it. It is well within your right to think so. I think that as far as the OP is concerned you’ve answered the question. Anything else is just rehashing old arguments, and I daresay a hijack of this thread.

MrVisible:
As a religious person (Wiccan), I am deeply offended that you generalize all religious people as bible-thumping homophobes with persecution complexes. I ask you to reconsider your equating religious people with fundamentalist Christians. There’s a whole thread on it right here.

I personally have no problem with calling deity an MSP. What I do have a problem with is the refusal of some people to understand that there are some things that you may not find offensive that other people do.

117

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I’m not sure why you’re so convinced that MSP is intended to mock or insult someone.
I never used this particular term, but I very often compare belief in god with belief in fairies, which is basically the same. And I’m not using this comparison because it’s derisive, but because it’s a valid analogy.

The concept of god is surrounded by so much reverence and positive feelings that in most cases believers just don’t get our point, don’t understand how we actually feel concerning this “god”, and how our argument could be valid.

When I use this analogy, I expect the believer to understand my position since he’s likely to consider the belief in fairies as as ludicrous as I consider the belief in god. I try to convey the message that seriously, I don’t believe in this god. Not for an instant. Not more than he believes in fairies. IME in real life, the fact that god could be actually considered no more seriously than the belief in fairies escapes to a lot of believers. A lot of them seem to assume that I take this belief somewhat seriously. So, it’s IMO an important point to make.

I also expect he’ll understand why I think that a particular argument is invalid by applying it to something he doesn’t believe in at all : “Would you agree that fairies also…blah blah…”

I used the analogy of a parent torturing his childrens in the other current pit thread. There also, someone was “pissed off” (so I understand she felt insulted) by this analogy, which is IMO perfectly valid. The very fact that she was pissed off seems to prove that she didn’t get my arguments before.

There’s zero difference between stating “god doesn’t exist” and “god is as real as pixies” or “a god who send believer to hell is evil” and “a god who send believers to hell is similar to a father torturing his children because they ate the cookies”. If the other person feel insulted by the second statement (fairies/father torturing his children), which conveys exactly the same meaning, it shows me the person didn’t really get what I meant the first time, hence that I was right in using an analogy to be clearly understood.

I would add that I frequently used the fairies argument when responding to agnostics stating that only their position was valid since one can’t know for sure whether god exists or not, etc…by asking whether they were also afairist, aunicornist, asantaclausist, etc… I suppose you’ll admit that if my goal was to insult people with this analogy, I would have zero reason to use it in a debate with an agnostic.

So, definitely, I don’t intend to stop using these analogies. They seem to me not only to be valid and useful, but also necessary, since apparently it’s only way to clearly speak my mind and expect to be understood. If people feel insulted, probably they should feel as much insulted when I say “your god doesn’t exist” since the message isn’t different in any way.

118

I assume that if I was to tell a phrenologist that there is no evidence to back up phrenology, and referred to it as “feeling little head bumps”, that it may cause them pain. Should I refrain from doing so, because their feelings may be hurt? Should I respect their beliefs, and continue to allow them to spout their ignorance unchallenged in a forum where, if unopposed, it might be believed by the gullible?

Why should I treat your feelings in regards to your beliefs any differently? What makes your beliefs so special that a harmless form of ridicule needs to be railed against?

The difference you speak of is the difference between respecting your beliefs, and pretending to respect your beliefs. Until I have some proof that your beliefs deserve respect, I am unwilling to do either.

This thread was started to try and get people to avoid using ridiculous terms to describe what is, to us, a ridiculous concept. Frankly, I didn’t use that tactic before, and I doubt that I will now; I have better arguments at my disposal. But having someone attempt to tell me what I can and can’t say about a belief system that affects my life deeply is simply unacceptable. There are enough people genuflecting before enough deities in this world already. I think it’s fitting that some of us are pointing at the self-important worshippers of divine hallucinations, and laughing our asses off.

And JustPlainBryan, I don’t believe that all religious people are Bible-thumping homophobes. But I do think you’re all pretty funny.

119

How about deity?

120

Let me ask this-

The constant statements of “anyone who believes in a higher power is acting irrationally”, and throwing around MSP, any different from people who are offended when people use the word “gay” as a derogatory term, as in “Man, that is so GAY!!”
After all, they’re not meaning it as homosexual, are they?

How is this any different from saying,
“I don’t believe that all gay people are promiscuous AIDS ridden sluts. But I do think you’re all weird and/or disgusting.”
Just curious. Because I think both are pretty offensive.

Common courtesy. Just because “do unto others” comes from the Bible, does that mean it’s irrational?