This delightful trainwreck, which began as a pitting of gobear’s habbit of insulting Christians with gross generalizations and “surprisingly” turned into a round of semantic bukakke.
Ah yes, but what about those who would hate the CE God if He existed? No doubt there are people like that on the SDMB.
They’d be “soft athiests”, and an athiest, no matter how cuddly, is an athiest.
That, and the “Seinfeld” thread supposedly dealing with Evolution and Religion (but going off in all tangents) started by the ironically named nolies.
I am one. I don’t believe in any god, but if the Bible’s god existed, I would hate him.
Nope. Pretty silly actually.
*Although you say you are a Christian you are not a Christian by my standards. My authority in concluding this is that I am a Christian by my standards.*I trust that you see the absurdity in that statement.
Now let’s make it even more silly:
*Although you say your are an Athiest you are not an Athiest by my standards. My authority is concluding this is that I am a Christian by my standards.*That’s essentially what you have set out in your OP.
The ongoing bickering between various sky pixie believers as to who holds proper authority is nothing new.
No matter how much you scream “Enough!”, the media won’t hear you until you say something so stupid it just bears repeating. I don’t think that moderate/liberal Christians are going to give birth to a voice stupid enough to be heard. :dubious:
As individuals, we can say “James Dobson does not speak for me,” and we may or may not be heard, but even if we are not heard, that doesn’t necessarily mean all consent to being spoken for by Dobson or Falwell or whatever :smack: comes next.
So theists disagree on authority. What’s the point?
Well, at least the club meetings are still on. And it looks like the fundraiser is for Secular Organizations for Sobriety. Perhaps you could reschedule the picnic for a warmer month?
Well, no, but I don’t think you’re suggesting anything analogous to what con-men like Dobson are doing to mainstream Christianity. Dobson, as America’s leading wannabe theocrat, is one of many very public figureheads leading a powerful religious movement with millions of followers who provide enough funding and political clout to influence any election. Fundamentalists may not be in the majority, but neither can they be swept under the rug and ignored. Not to downplay the geopolitical significance of the ‘goth’ movement but it doesn’t bear comparison with the fundamentalist Christian movement.
However, if goths had as much influence over the public discourse as Fundamentalist Christians, I would expect you to do something to repudiate them lest you lose your right to complain if their ‘normal bashing’ agenda gains momentum.
Intellectually I completely agree, yet I admit that doing so goes against my gut. In my experience it seems that when a Christian speaks through the mainstream media, more often than not he’s some wacko fundie pushing some loony agenda. One can only hear so many unchallenged proclamations from such a vocal minority before one begins to believe that maybe, just maybe, the fundie’s aren’t speaking solely for the minority after all. Hell, I don’t know any rational Christians as lucid as Poly and Siege in real life. All my day to day contact with Christianity is in the form of idiotic Fundie noise. If I hadn’t become acquainted with Poly and Siege’s philosophies on the Dope I could be forgiven for thinking that Fundamentalism was far less a majority than, in fact, it is.
I mean, when was the last time you heard anyone but an atheist debunk any of James Dobson’s outlandish claims? When vicious, sociopathic human predators like Pat Robertson and Peter Popoff claim they can harness the power of Jesus to zap brain tumors over the airwaves, why does someone like James Randi need to step up and do the yeoman’s work proving that they’re full of shit? Shouldn’t moderate, reasonable Christians be doing that? After all, it’s their religion that’s being co-opted by these con men for their own personal gain.
As I see it, there are two reasons. Firstly, rational Christians should be more vocal because Fundamentalists are so vocal that reasonable Christians risk getting tarred with the same brush used to portray Dobson and Robertson.
Their bigoted attacks on gays and Muslims, their lunatic vendetta’s against Spongebob Squarepants, Tinky-winky, Willy Wonka or whichever innocent fictional character is driving them batshit this week, their Medieval sexual politics and the like, should not go unchallenged because the effect of their stupidity on the general population is cumulative. Someone who doesn’t mingle with rational Christians and yet is bombarded by stories of fundamentalist idiocy is encouraged, by every new pointless and bigoted evangelical crusade to make the transition from “Stupid Fundies” to “Stupid Christians” and this is something we should all be interested in stopping. It can’t happen if Dobson and his ilk are challenged regularly and the best people to do that are rational Christians.
Secondly, Dobson isn’t just some harmless crank with a Buick sized chip on his shoulder about kids programming, he’s a mouthpiece for a movement espousing no small number of highly insidious social principles; homosexuals are abominations before God, America is first and foremost a Christian nation, the teaching of evolution harms our nations children…you know the sort of thing. Such nonsense needs to be answered
When holocaust deniers like David Irving first came to prominence it was considered unfashionable in academic circles to stoop to their level to challenge them. Now their disgusting lies and distortions have real social weight. The same is already becoming true of the bigoted lies of the hard line fundamentalists.
I would agree were we talking about something more innocuous than Fundamentalist Christianity, which I view as a genuinely dangerous movement rather than something that can be dismissed as irrelevant. However, considering the clout of people like Dobson and Robertson, I don’t think rational Christians can be content to simply defend themselves against the onslaught of the evangelicals. They have to fight back, preferably “With great vengeance and fuuurious anger” 
Repeat after me:
A - T - H - E - I - S - T.
athEIst
Derived from the Greek atheos, “godless”, prefix a-, without, theos, god, deity.
Please make a note of this. :mad:
When I saw the thread title, I thought it was a take-off on “There are no atheists in foxholes”. I thought that the theme would be, that discourse in the Pit has become so vitriolic, and battle so unsparing, that even the most confirmed atheist would beseech divine assistance while posting, never knowing whether their next flame might be their last.
Alas, I was mistaken.
[QUOTE=PolycarpHowever, consistency indicates that if you’re buying their metaphysics, you buy it whole hog.[/QUOTE]
My emphasis.
This is the fulcrum of your argument and it’s subject to collapse. Logic does not dictate that because you accept something that someone says, you must accept everything they say.
Well, that went pretty well, but let’s try it again with comprehensible coding:
My emphasis.
This is the fulcrum of your argument and it’s subject to collapse. Logic does not dictate that because you accept something that someone says, you must accept everything they say.
No. For several reasons.
When a Christian talks about Christianity, he does so with more inherent authority than when he talks about e.g. Zen Buddhists. If I wanted to know what, exactly, a Zen Buddhist was, I would almost certainly not talk to a Jesuit priest, no matter how well informed. While, certainly, other factors may come into consideration, such as e.g. the combined weight of historical record and several thousand years of philosophers writing about the subject, I’d probably pretty much ignore the hypothetical Jesuit priest’s views of Zen Buddhism in favor of those I considered more knowledgeable on the subject; that is, I would be more inclined to use other documents to verify the views of said priest, rather than believing that because he was an expert in theology I had to accept his word in all matters theological. In much the same way, if a small but vocal percentage of a population told me that a Christian does or is X, and that they were, in fact, Christians, I’d be more inclined to believe them than when they start telling me about what e.g. I, personally, believe. In fact, you commit a logical fallacy; it is possible to be right about one thing, but wrong about something else. If Pat Robertson tells me the sun rises in the East, that doesn’t mean he’s also correct when he tells me that he can turn water into wine (I mean, other than via the old pagan trick of feeding it to grapevines first).
But, as you are well aware, that ain’t the fucking problem. The problem is that 1) the CEs have uttered the sort of comments that make me believe that as a group, they want to kill me. Me, personally, for any number of reasons. I know what my baptist father told me that “the wages of sin is death” means, but the CEs make it sound so much closer and more personal. The CEs have told me in no uncertain terms that they want the right to indoctorinate my child, mine, the light of my life, and make him swear, every day, to a false god (1), and that they are willing to use the full weight of the legal system to compel him to do so. They have told me that some of my friends, blood brothers through bloodshed, have a relationship that isn’t as holy as theirs to their wives. And they claim, perhaps falsely, perhaps not, to belong to the same group of people you do.
What the fuck, you might be thinking, does that have to do with you? Well, a couple of things. You, personally, are under a commandment, a holy order, from your deity, not mine, yours, to do something about them. It is written “before removing the mote from thine neighbor’s eye, remove the beam from you own”. It is written, in the several of the books behind me “Physician, heal thyself. And that’s a global thing; before you go around telling people who ain’t got fucking shit to do with me how to live their lives and about what a swell god I am, you need to clean your own damn house, and you really need to muzzle those yapping little mutts who are giving me a bad name before you condescend to tell atheists not to give you shit (remember all that shit I said about the first sin and throwing stones? That meant you, Polycarp), because, frankly, I am love and even I have trouble putting up with those people” (I have special versions of the holy books that are extra special clear. You might want one).
Now, the fact of the matter is that, with the exception of the ability to buy a few senators, the CEs are pretty much emasculated little twits who do little but promise something they can’t be sued for failing to deliver, so they really aren’t worth getting worked up over. I mean, they aren’t worth my getting worked up over; they aren’t standing up and saying untrue things about my gods, so I don’t care, and you’d rather rail against atheists than take the actual assholes to task, so I’m guessing you don’t fucking care, either. I’m talking about what they say, which is a lot, not about what they can do, which is, let’s face it, nothing.
In other words, it isn’t the atheists twittering away on a fucking message board that are the problem. Ohhh…poor polycarp doesn’t like it when he’s made fun of. Wierd; some of the people who belong to your club think I ought to suffer the eternity of hellfire, so you’ll have to forgive me if I suggest you take a big heaping teaspoon of too fucking bad for you. Anyway, it ain’t us, it’s the so-called CE’s on national fucking television that are giving your faith a bad name, not us. We’re* saying “wow, you guys are fucking nut jobs until proven otherwise”. The CEs are actively insulting your god on national television. Actively making a mockery of that which you claim to believe in. Now, I’m indifferent to the idea of whether your god exists or not, so I don’t give a shit, but if I were you, I’d be offended at them.
I don’t buy the theology or the metaphysics, in part or in whole, that these people espouse. I think they are morons. Therefore, I don’t accept their claims that they speak for all Christians, nor do I have to accept your weird contention that I have to accept their definition of what I am, when I know damn well what I am. However, given that Christians are, by my read, dominated by the loudest of the quacks, I’m startin’ to think that perhaps each of them ought to be viewed with a little suspicion until such time as they obey the commandments of the Lord and start to you know, clean out the temple. Your god may have mentioned something on the subject? “My temple should be a place of prayer, not a den of thieves”? Oh, no that was Tim Rice. Nevermind.
Clean your own house. When, say, the Anglicans don’t split over gay marriages then I’ll believe that it’s only the fringe groups that are having some problems reading your holy books. When I can believe that some kooky fringe Christian group isn’t going to treat creation myths as science in a biology classroom, I’ll believe that you are as afflicted with fringe groups as the rest of the world. When my currency doesn’t have the name of a deity on it, I’ll believe you aren’t attempting to secretly convert the world. Until then, clean your own god damn house and leave the rest of us alone.
Until then, it sure as shit looks like you’re all a little on the “to be treated with suspicion” list, until proven otherwise.
I’ve read literally thousands of your posts, and know you to be a good and honorable person. This falls into the realm of “I’m just sayin’, is all”. You can take it or leave it.
- that’s the royal we; I don’t speak for the more civilized, um, non-god haters on this board.
(1) 68% of American’s believe this, according to this cite I’m guessing those aren’t the great swarms of atheists who believe in, but hate, god.
The points are that the OP’s argument is silly because it hinges on which group has the self-assumed authority to dictate how others are defined, and that in the real world the self-assumed authority is used to bolster power grabs that hurt athiests in any number of ways. In short, there is no freedom from religion, for it is fundamental to the nature of most religions to self-assume moral authority and then try to expand that to real authority over believers of different faiths and non-believers.
EddyTeddyFreddy, my apologies.
You are unfamiliar with the miracle of the one potatoe that became 3 tons of potato salad after Polycarp prayed over it?
Since I argue about this stuff all the time, can I still stay an Atheist?
Huh, in my interpretation, all he’s saying is that conservative evangelicals do not define Christianity. But then again, I’m liable to say that no group owns Christianity, and hopefully protections are strong enough so that no one religious group can enforce moral authority over believers of other faiths.
Egg salad anyone? I make a special one for the church supper called “Zoe’s Eggshell Cease Day-o.”
I think some of you have been whooshed.
Polycarp, just a word of clarification about Billy Graham. He also believes that non-Christians can share in the grace of God. His son, Franklin, does not.
So far, the Episcopal Church itself has not split over the ordination of a gay bishop and the break with the Anglican Communion may be temporary. There is a meeting scheduled for June.
Did he really call the CE fringe groups? Did he say that the Bible is easy to interpret? Are you responsible for all people who share some things in common with you?