Get off your high horse.
The origin of our discussions isn’t relevant nor is my mother’s moral character. FTR she pinned me into a corner with the god talk and asked to hear what I had to say on it. As for respect, again, one type of nonsense is as worthy of scorn and debunking as another. If Mum was ill and believed in homeopathy, you could be damn sure I’d be fighting to take her to a hospital to receive real care; that hardly makes me ugly. It makes me a responsible human helping another.
Nonsense. again. My denial of religion fits the facts and is logically consistent. That is not true of the believer’s fantasies; something even they effectively acknowledge with their emphasis on faith.
Insisting over and over again that atheism and theism are intellectual equals doesn’t make it true.
No, I can point out that their beliefs are baseless and foolish. They are not going to leave me alone; they are not going to stop trying to force their beliefs on me and everyone else. They are my enemies; they hate me (along with every other unbeliever), and many I’m sure would assault or kill me if they thought they could do so without punishment from the government. I owe them neither respect nor politeness.
Just don’t confuse the two, that’s all.
Okay.
And that’s obviously stupid. So you simply say “that’s stupid - that’s not believing what I want.”
Win out? Win what?
If you’re standing for the principle of live and let live, you don’t lose. If you are pushing back with your own beliefs, you’re not longer standing for that principle. You’re BUYING INTO the idea that people can push their beliefs on others, and helping set that precedent. You’re abandoned neutrality. And you might end up on the losing side of that in the long run.
So, again, don’t confuse the two. If you demand that others respect your right to believe, you have to respect theirs.
You’re right and they are wrong. You said that already.
So did they.
I said nothing of the sort.
You’re using the same kind of arguments, that’s all.
You’re not going to get anywhere. Why try?
Did it occur to you that a religious person would say the exact same thing about you? That they are trying to help you by saving your soul or whatnot?
So what you are really talking about seems to be an Evangelical Atheism, asking if there is a fundamental, moral, need to spread the Word of your belief system. In this case atheism.
How is this any different from the moral obligation that some religious people feel about the need to spread their own Word?
Aren’t you then becoming a caricature of what you seek to disprove? Aren’t you then a preacher of atheism seeking to convert the ignorant masses?
I don’t see the difference really.
And this is equally one of those ideas that many religious people and, as even hinted at by the OP of this thread, many non-religious people seem to follow that is socially destructive. And it’s not limited to religion either, it’s a something I see all over the place including completely non-religious philosophies, poltics… hell, as I’m sure most of you have as well, I’ve had people come up to me and lecture me about how awesome some band is and why I’m a complete moron for not loving them too. The answer here isn’t to reciprocate because it only causes people to dig in their heels further.
In my view, aggressive evangelism of any belief will tend to have a more negative effect because it creates that resistance and sometimes aggressive return likewise. If you think it’s one of the things that many religious people do wrong, why would you want to copy the behavior?
You really like that false equivalence argument don’t you? HERE
I’m not.
I agree that it’s stupid, but it’s deliberate.
Society will be shaped according to their views.
If you’re standing up for the principle and making sure that principle is defended, that’s correct. If you’re only practicing it on your own, then yes, you may run into a problem when you deal with someone else who doesn’t believe in that princple.
I understand that and I have said so.
As DerTrihs mentioned, the difference is primarily in that one sided has demonstrable, repeatable, physical evidence for their logical position that is always open to revision, whereas the other has a bunch of woo, pseudo-science, and ever tortured illogic.
For the thread in general, I’m off to work (night shift) so I’ll check in tomorrow.
Yet if you tried it, you’d probably catch a lot less hate and fewer beatings. You are not the Enlightened One charged with saving the masses from themselves. The respect and politeness you disdain is part of the social contract. Give it to get it.
So. What. You keep repeating that as if it mattered. Racists, Nazis and the inmates of lunatic asylums also believe they are right; belief is not some automatic conferrer of plausibility.
Nonsense. I’m using the exact opposite arguments; my disbelief in gods is based on the facts and on logic; not on denial of them. You are just doing the standard routine of loudly insisting that both sides in an argument are the same, rather than trying to defend an indefensible belief.
Garbage. A few decades of open, aggressive atheism has done more to convince people than millennia of being what you call “polite”. That’s why so many defenders of religion want atheists to shut up like the “good old days”.
Nonsense. Believers hated atheists at least as much when they were so silent as to be effectively mythical. They don’t hate me because of anything I say or do; most don’t even know I exist. They hate me because I’m an atheist, period. My existence is an affront to them. They don’t even really hate the actual me; they hate a demonic figure that is their image of what atheists are like.
Right…
Nice hand wave…
It isn’t a hand wave. The laws of physics work; prayer and other religious nonsense doesn’t.
This is a fair position for theists who make scientific arguments with religious reasoning, like Young-Earth Creationism. It is not a fair argument for what I think is the point here, God’s existence, as it is a non-scientific claim. And even if people believe tortured illogical pseudoscience, why is that another person’s responsibility to fix? Fighting ignorance is only effective if those who are ignorant are open to new ideas; you will very rarely be able to browbeat someone into it. The only time I see that as at all reasonable is if said person is trying to make, say YEC, a subject taught in school. But even then, the goal shouldn’t be to necessarily convince that individual but simply to defeat the socially destructive idea, which would be that it should be taught in school.
Because it hurts both themselves and others.
I wasn’t taking a pro-religion stand.
I was asking how preaching atheism to convert people to that point of view is different from what the fundementalist religious people do.
Feeling a moral responsibility, a need, to convert people either toward your belief or away from theirs, is very much the same thing.
It’s preaching.
The former is true, the latter is false. Also, the latter is a belief system, while the former is just pointing out that it’s wrong.
How very didactic.