Covering your bases, I see. 
Since we’re in the pit, can I just say: organised religion sucks the blunt end of a donkey.
You’re best off shot of the preachy cow.
It’s why I put the thread in the Pit!
I’m afraid you’ve missed the point. Replace “organized religion” with “intolerant people.”
You got the better end of the deal.
Who needs bigots as friends?
Ever found a snake in the grass?
It’s a beautiful day. You’re laying out a bright red checkered blanket for a picnic, but the warmth of the sun and the soft greenness of the grass makes you want to just lay down and roll around like a fuzzy happy kitten. So, you’re writhing about all frolicsome-like when… wait, what’s that? It’s a SNAKE! A SNAKE! Oooh, it’s a SNAKE! Badger, Badger, Badger, Badger.
This is about how she feels about you being an atheist. You are a nice person whom she got along with. Atheists are snide amoral fornicators and drug users. You ruined her picnic by not conforming to her preconcieved stereotype.
If you’re lucky, she’ll give it some thought, start questioning what she’s been told, and try to be friends with you just to see how the other half lives. Whether you feel like trying to be a shining example of atheism for this poor unfortunate girl is your own choice… but try not to take the “Well good for you!” advice to heart and be snooty if this girl tries to make amends.
I think he meant “mate” as in the British slang term for “good friend”.
Anyway, I agree with everyone else that your “friend” is a jerk, and that you’re better off without her.
I think binary guy has the best advice in this thread. You’re still in high school, right? Probably, this girl has just started to really self-identify with her religion, and not just see it as something she does because her parents do it. And she probably hasn’t ever actually talked to an atheist before, and didn’t know how to act. I hate to say it, but the first time I ever got in a serious religious discussion with a friend, I didn’t act a whole lot better than your friend did (and I was the atheist in that encounter, to boot). A couple days later, I realized I’d been a dick and apologized and we were friends for the rest of high school. Luckily for me, he was a Christian, and didn’t have any choice about forgiving me.
I wouldn’t write her off just yet: she may still come around and realize how unfairly she treated you. If she doesn’t, though, no great loss.
Sorry, I don’t differentiate the two. Organised religion, by definition, attracts intolerant people who wish to assert their moral superiority over others. The basic aim of most religions appears to me to be to kill and/or convert those poor souls that do not conform to their particular interpretation of centuries-old writings.
In the 21st century, the human race doesn’t need that shit.
Are you in a position of moral authority to judge that?
What a narrow view…almost a…<gasp>…bigoted view itself?
Funny, from your post i’d have to assume that so does atheism.
Evangelical Atheism is just as bad as Evangelical Christianity, or Evangelical Anything in my book. intolerant people can be found anywhere, it’s not just a religious thing.
In a lot of churches, YOU will be shunned if you don’t break off all possible contact with non-believers. It’s been so long now since I burned out and never looked back that I don’t remember which Bible verses are used to justify this. But let me tell you an anecdote:
Back when I living in Boise, and my entire life (literally) revolved around my church, my church friends, my Contemporary Christian Music, books, and that kind of thing, I made a road trip to Seattle from whence I had originally moved. I was at that time in a church that was, to put it nicely, borderline cult, but we’ll not get into that.
Anyway, I made this trip to Seattle, and on the Saturday evening I went out to the Ave (Seattle’s University District) with folks from my old church, to go witnessing. Well. I didn’t care for the method of the folks I was with, which largely consisted of shoving Jack Chick tracts in their faces, so I went around the corner to pray, and across the street I saw Jonathan “Sperry”, a fellow I’d known from my old BB days at the university. He’d attended the BB ‘Satan Room’ ‘Satan Parties’ I couldn’t tell people at church about (you know, the ones where they sacrificed a Twinkie on a live human altar, sometimes in a masking-tape pentacle on the floor), and I’d always really liked him.
I beckoned him across the street, and he came bouncing over in his anti-rainbow clothing, so excited about something that had happened to him: He’d been getting cash from a cash machine, and some guy came up to him and made a pass at him. Well, it wasn’t that he didn’t do guys, he just didn’t want to do somebody he’d just met, so he turned the guy down. But he was so excited that a stranger had found him attractive enough to hit on! He told me this story, he told the next person who passed by who knew him this story, and he was just jazzed. We had a really good visit.
Around the corner, I could hear the people I was supposedly with, laughing and talking about all the heathens who were going to go to hell. Next to me, his back against the brick wall, was an old friend who was thrilled to death that a stranger had made a pass at him. And there I was in the middle, hoping desperately that Sperry couldn’t hear them (though I knew he could) and hoping they wouldn’t come around the corner, see me talking to him, and come tear into either of us.
Right then, I saw how “they” (the rest of the world) saw “us” (the Christians) and it was an ugly thing. It was the beginning of the end. On my next roadtrip, I spent my time hanging out with all my old college friends, being accepted by them for who I was, able to relax for the first time in who knows how long…and telling no one from my old church I was in town. When I went back to Boise, I got bludgeoned mercilessly with strings of Bible verses (all out of context but memorized flawlessly) until I fled the house of my ‘church friends’ and burned out on Christianity within another month. I have never gone back.
I would bet good money that the OP’s erstwhile friend would come under heavy-duty criticism from basically everyone else in her social circle if she dared to have an unbeliever for a friend. Hell, I used to get chewed on by my church friends because my brother’s girlfriend, now wife, is a self-styled witch. Like I could do anything about it? They would say, How can you STAND it? Uh, I like her. And what am I supposed to do, cut my brother out of my life just because I see you folks every Sunday?
The OP’s feelings have been hurt, but she has to understand, what this “friend” has done says NOTHING about her…and everything about the friend. Far from loving and accepting people unconditionally, a great many Christians can unconditionally accept others ONLY if those others are doing their best to conform to Christian ideals. The OP has met one. It’s a loss, but it’s not a big loss in the big scheme of things. Pity this “friend”, who must live in so rigid a set of rules, and struggle so hard to conform, so she can be accepted by her group.
And move on.
I’m not sobbing over the loss of her (she was a bit annoying to tell you the truth), but it just aggrivates me that because I don’t have a “set” religion, she doesn’t want to be friends. I have other friends who are very strong believers, but they don’t mind that I don’t have faith, because they like me for who I am, not because I go to their church and read the same Bible as they do. I know most of her other friends, and they didn’t mind my Atheism, so it is really just her. I’ll just stick with the friends that like me for me and don’t care that I am Atheist.
flamingbananas *I’m not sobbing over the loss of her (she was a bit annoying to tell you the truth), but it just aggrivates me that because I don’t have a “set” religion, she doesn’t want to be friends. I have other friends who are very strong believers, but they don’t mind that I don’t have faith, because they like me for who I am, not because I go to their church and read the same Bible as they do. I know most of her other friends, and they didn’t mind my Atheism, so it is really just her. I’ll just stick with the friends that like me for me and don’t care that I am Atheist. *
No, that’s not it, flammingbananas, in your heart you realize that your proclaimed Atheism is bullshit. You feel a deep need for a higher purpose in your life than simply being. Cows simply be. Humans are part of a larger whole. Cows are Atheists. You are not a cow.
Bless you.
Apparently, she’s not a sheep either, though.
So am I. And I eat cows for breakfast. And sometimes lunch. What’s your point?
While I’m always quick to come down on people who claim that all religions are cults (in the prejorative sense), the determined refusal to associate with people that don’t share your beliefs is one of the major signs of cultism: make sure the believers never come in long or deep contact with people who might dilute the effects of the cult and its beliefs.
Also, virtually anything Milum says is a sign of brain damage.
Whaddaya mean, “virtually”? Or are you simply leaving yourself a loophole for the hypothetical day sometime in the future where Milum will write something that isn’t tin-foil-asshat material?
Why shouldn’t it? Meaningful friendships are based on shared interest, values, and mutual admiration.
Marc