You freely toss about the terms theist and atheist. If you want to specify some specific subset than do so. You don’t have any basis to group all believers or non-believers together. It’s typical stereotyping to pick the most objectionable representatives of a group and apply their shortcomings to all. That’s the kind of behavior I expect from fundamentalists of any variety.
Nobody should be derided simply for their expression of faith, or lack thereof.
Well, when the article of faith is, itself, ludicrous, then it’s “fair game.” Flat Earthers are notoriously subject to open ridicule. I’d hate to live under a set of rules that forbade mockery of Flat Earthers!
That could have been a quote from a schizophrenic prior to a mass shooting.
Here is the basic problem with your reasoning. We have people like you who have had personal experiences that led them to believe in Jesus, others who have had personal experiences that led them to quite different religious beliefs. Therefore we know that having a personal religious experience is not a reliable way to determine if your particular version of God exists. I’m sure there is a guy in Iran right now who has just as much faith as you, that thinks beating women with sticks if they show a little too much skin is a divinely inspired commandment.
Luckily, living in the 21st century we have ways of evaluating ideas to see if they are valid. The day that a theist can make predictions about a repeatable phenomenon that doesn’t act in occurrence with the known laws of physics then I will re-evaluate my stance.
There are so many things that would be convincing:
Instead the proof that people accept are really weak sauce: “I saw an angel on the wing of the plane”, or “I prayed and my grandmother survived” (though God let thousands of other people die that same day).
If you want to believe, go ahead. Just don’t knock on my door at 8 AM and give me pamphlets, or try and insert drivel into the curriculum, or pass laws that reflect your own religious convictions.
No; I ignore them because they don’t matter. They have no visibility beyond their personal acquaintances, and have no political effect on the nation.
Yes, they* should.* Faith is at best foolish and very destructive.
Why on earth would you expect me to do any of those things?
Alas, because large numbers of your co-believers are doing those things daily.
That may be true but it’s hardly logical to assume that all Christians are, is it? Especially when there’s plenty of evidence that we aren’t.
There are Christians that do understand the teachings of Jesus and try to follow them as best as they can. But many Christians do not follow the teachings of Jesus and rather follow the doctrine of their church which is not the teachings of Jesus yet they call themselves “Christian.”
They condemn others of different life styles and beliefs, but Jesus said to not judge others and to love others. They don’t know what love is.
As I said, intolerance is the hallmark of fundamentalism.
Well, I assume they vote. So they have some political effect on the nation. The fact that such a large proportion of right wing religious groups in the US have such a large influence on politics is to me, at minimum, disheartening. But more and more they are proving themselves to be worthy of being marginalized. So I see the social tide to more rational/fact based politics rising, as evidenced by the recent national acceptance of gay marriage (and rights as a whole). All signs of better things to come, even in our lifetime.
But this OP is not about that. It’s about whether a person can legitimately claim that they come by their belief system as a series of logical steps that to them are internally consistant. To me that’s a separate discussion as to whether or not sufficeint evidence for the existance of god exists to externally support their set of beliefs. If faith alone makes an individual feel anchored and secure in the feeling that there is a meaning to life beyond simple existance and they strive to be a better person as a result, then I have no basis for objection to their conclusion that belief is logical to them to the extent that it demonstrably improves their quality of life and by extension the lives of people they come in contact with.
But you know The One True Way, don’t you?
Those are two entirely separate questions.
No, you can not legitimately claim to use logic to conclude that there is a God, particularly the specific one the OP believes in.
Yes, it is logical to go along with a belief system if it makes you happier. To the degree that non-believers are discriminated against, it might make sense to go along with a religious tradition even if you don’t believe.
That is the one thing that most religions agree on, their’s is the one true way.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear in my post.
Not what the OP is about and not an example of actual belief, only lip service in the face of self preservation under circumstances you described. I’m assuming that for the purposes of the OP, the actors in question are genuine in their expression of belief.
Yes, it is the path to unconditional love.
Is that in the same park as the path to I think we should see other people? 
The path to unconditional love is in all parks, it is everywhere you are. It starts within you.
I like to think of various beliefs as just being competing stories. Which story more successfully incorporates the other? Which story is more self consistent? Which story has a more complete world building? Which story has to resort more to retconning and fanwanks? Stories are meme sets, and like genetics they can undergo recombination. If both stories have strengths and weaknesses, you can combine the strengths into a new better story.
Now most fundamentalist literal portrayals of God pretty much fail at being believable stories as they relate to human history and daily life. On the other hand, both God and physics suffer the same “first cause” dilemma when it comes to an origin story. So we might have to abandon both for that part of the story and substitute something from philosophy or math or information theory.
But God, as a general concept rather than as a particular cultural portrayal, is such an obvious idea that it must be true in some context, just maybe one we haven’t found yet. Maybe God is best thought of as just an extrapolation of trends in our technological progress. See for example the series “Person of Interest”. And maybe even, that idea can be extrapolated backwards or sideways.
The trouble is, you either have to water the idea down, as in your example, thus removing from it any working resemblance to its origin, or else you have to succumb to “naivism,” saying that any idea that is “obvious” has to be true.
The idea of “nature being a conscious entity” is obvious to nearly all primitive societies. Spirits, gods, sprites, etc. Heck, it feels that way to people having advanced scientific knowledge: a walk in a lonely woods feels like being among animate spirits. Primarily, that’s because that was how we are evolved to feel: that particular sensation, even if hallucinatory, kept our ancestors alive.
Lots of things are obvious. The world is flat; down is always down; mountains are cold because heat doesn’t rise; heat rises; glowing coals are hotter than a frying pan, so if you can walk on coals, you can walk on a frying pan.
Take combustion: it’s “obvious” that the ashes of a burned log weigh much less than the original firewood. It took some very sophisticated physical experiments to demonstrate that the totality of the combustion products exceed in weight the original fuel. What was “obvious” only succumbed to organized inquiry.
Or take Darwin and Wallace: it’s “obvious” that animals come in different kinds. It took insight and close, careful, organized observation to show that this isn’t exactly the case.
I think the same is true of the idea of God. It is perfectly natural and obvious – until one develops an organized system of thinking. The gods started dying when the ancients developed philosophy, and science nailed the coffin closed.
And while you’re at it, you can Love Big Brother.