Is that a high horse you’re on?
I believe mainstream Hindus are not likely to say anything of the kind. Most Hindus give at least lip service to the “many paths up a mountain” idea. Hindus might commonly stereotype and criticize the behaviour of people from other religions, but I don’t think they regularly attack them on grounds of dogma.
No, reality.
Being an atheist has never really given me any problems. I’ve been to Christian church and Jewish temple, a Catholic retreat, a Confirmation and a bat mitzvah, and Passover Seders too. I was a cub scout, and didn’t even know they were religious until after I left. Everywhere I was treated with respect and made to feel welcome. I never felt pressured to convert or change. It’s never been an issue in any of my friendships. Have I been lucky? Maybe. I’m an optimist though, so I hope that others have just been really unlucky. I’m signing up to do Habitat for Humanity this summer, we’ll see how that goes 
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I think most religions don’t really regard us as a threat. We’re not organized, we don’t evangelize, we don’t lack morals any more than any other group. Unless someone runs into one of the rare, really militant and pushy atheists, I think that most have a fairly neutral opinion about atheists in general.
Of course, there’s the rub. You could be good friends with five atheists and never even notice, but when that sixth one starts calling you gullible, stupid and a pedophile, there goes your whole opinion of atheists in general.
That “Can America trust atheists?” thread made me really sad, as I had no idea so many people felt they couldn’t trust us. I think, though, that those opinions may have been based on a few bad encounters, and thus, as time goes on and more people encounter atheists in their daily lives, those opinions will change for the better. Well, I hope they change, anyway.
I’ve been told as an atheist, it’s impossible to be forgiven by Jesus. You can be forgiven for sins, even murder, but to be an atheist means you reject everything. At least with heresy, you may be misguided and Jesus could forgive that if your hearts in the right place. But as an atheist, forget it. Perhaps that’s why atheists are looked down upon by religious folks.
Plus, some theists think we atheists are just being stubborn. After all, we know deep down inside that God exists, but want to play “intellectual” or “rebellious”. But, ho-ho, we’ll be shown whose really smart in the end!
I mean, look at that tree, isn’t it pretty?
This is rather dangerous thinking, EH. Don’t ever underestimate the very real hostility most religious people have toward atheists. We threaten their very identities, because deep in their hearts, every one of 'em asks, “What if the atheists are right?”
I occasionally engage a couple of local clerics in some banter – both know I don’t go to church, but neither knows the extent of my beliefs – and both of them have commented that they truly believe atheists are anti-God, and therefore inherently evil. I live in a conservative, God-centered community, and no one I know has anything close to the benevolent attitude Emerald Hawk attributes to them.
Finally, there is this nostrum used by every pastor, preacher, minister and priest I’ve ever known (and I’ve known a bunch, having once studied briefly for the Episcopal priesthood myself): “Jesus was either God incarnate and the spiritual savior of all humankind, or he was a fraud. If he was the former, then we are saved; if he was the latter, we are fools.” And the faithful absolutely believe that. So imagine what happens when they come face-to-face with someone who very simply and factually states, “Oh, I’m sorry, but God doesn’t really exist.” It tells them they are fools. It is, in every sense, an insult to them. And they hate that.
I tell door-to-door missionaries that we’re Jewish and happy being Jewish, wish them a nice day, and shut the door. That usually works.
There is another choice there:
Jesus was a person who, like all people, was right about some things and wrong about others.
Which means he was not a supernatural savior/aspect or God/whatever, but just a guy; a guy who’s teachings have no more inherent value than anyone else’s. That makes the true believers just as much fools as if he was an outright fraud. It also means Jesus was a fool, since it means he believed he was the Son of God but wasn’t.
Some interesting reading in this thread. It truly surprises me to hear testimony of so many feelings of anger, fear, resentment , harsh judgement etc about atheists. I’d like to think that kind of attitude is the exception to the rule but perhaps I have underestimated the feelings of animosity.
Honestly, atheists who really feel people are fools to believe in God {in some form} annoy me. It’s the opposite side of the coin of theists who feel that way about them.
It seems a lack of respect. If you really can’t understand how anybody believes in God then it shouldn’t be hard to imagine how some believers feel exactly that way about atheists.
OTOH, a jackass is a jackass atheist or believer.
You know for an atheist you seem to give a lot of credence to what the Bible says.
And still another choice: the biblical story of Jesus was made up by early Christians.
No, I’m simply using it as a source for information on the Jesus/God myth; I’d talk the same way if we were discussing the history of the conflict between Morgoth and the elves ( Tolkein ).
It cracks me up when I hear that argument. The fact is, those who subscribe to religion apparently aren’t asking that question. They’ve found an answer when they blindly accept that 1) there’s a god and 2) their particular flavor of goddiness is the answer to all the questions.
I don’t believe there’s a god and I question my existence and purpose once in a while. But not all that often. While I’m curious about why I’m here and if there’s something bigger than Life As We Know It ™, what’s important to me is how I conduct my time on Earth. That’s all that matters god or not. I don’t need a threat of eternal damnation to understand that shitting on people isn’t good. I don’t need a written list of commandments to steer me in the right direction. Common sense, compassion, a sense of fairness, and a desire to be charitable comes naturally to me because I was raised that way. I understand those qualities and they are valid on their own; I don’t require celestial supervision in order to practice good citizenship.
Most lifelong atheists (or, at least, long-time atheists) I’ve communicated with are surprised when they discover the vehemence of the faithful’s dislike for atheism. Most Christian, Jewish and Muslim believers (and this includes fundamentalists among them) are willing to live peacefully with each other because they see each other as at least moral and righteous, even if they subscribe to the “wrong” religion.
Happy Clam was on the right track with the game board metaphor. Religious people can tolerate anyone who at least plays the game. They cannot comprehend how some of us can just walk away from the game that is central to their lives. When we say we’re not interested in their game, it immediately alienates them because they simply don’t know how to relate to anyone outside of that gameboard. It really is like telling a Texan that football is “just a game.”
Religious people cannot understand how someone can be moral, family-oriented, honest and upright without the Ten Commandments or some similar law from above, to tell us how to behave. Let’s switch to a computer metaphor for a moment – a Christian’s moral code is the software that runs his life, but that software requires an operating system – religion – to tell him how to use his moral code. And his church is the hard drive – that’s the physical residence of the operating system and the software. A Christian looks at me and says, “There’s a computer without an operating system! He doesn’t even have a hard drive! How can he function without a hard drive?!” Truth is, I’m not even a computer. I’m something else that he has no experience with. This scares him, and that makes him angry.
But if believing something that turns out to be wrong makes you a fool, that means that every human being who has ever lived is a fool.
After thinking about it I reject this as the norm among religious folks. It seems to me that many religious folks know someone who is a decent person who doesn’t go to church and/or may be an atheist. I doubt it evokes anger and resentment all that much. I’m sure there’s feelings of " I wonder why" or “I can’t imagine” and even “Gee too bad they’re going to hell” but that’s not the same as anger and outright animosity.
I’m sure it does exist in a small percentage of folks who have some false preconceived notion of what atheists are and want. It’s those encounters that will be remembered and talked about but I don’t think it’s accurate to apply that kind of narrow minded negativity to religious folks in general.
Well, to a degree, yes; “to err is human” is not a new concept.
However, we aren’t expected to worship most humans; most humans aren’t claimed to be the ultimate source of wisdom; and some forms of foolishness are more extreme than others. “I am the son of the Supreme Being” is a very extreme claim, being wrong about that is very foolish.
True story:
When I was perhaps eleven, I met a Jewish girl. I was somewhat fascinated – I’d heard that the Jews were God’s chosen people, and that Jesus was a Jew. Therefore, Jews were Christian. I happily told the girl this.
It did not go over well. :smack: It was a revelation for me that some people, people who were perfectly nice and kind (even if this girl was emphatically not), were not Christian. That non-Christians didn’t look or act differently from anyone else in any important manner.
Curiously, I had known MANY non-Christians – the fact had just never settled itself in my brain. My military family had us living all over the country, and I’d known people from all manner of cultures. I’d just assumed, somehow, that they were all Christian. And my parents weren’t and aren’t religious fanatics, not by any standard. I don’t recall our churches being more nasty than most, either.
I’ve been a Christian, a Wiccan, a Unitarian, and an agnostic, but I’ve never been an atheist. For a very long time I just figured that something had created us all, something connected us all, but it wasn’t really important to worry myself about since I certainly couldn’t understand the motivations of a creature like that, and since He/She/It/They couldn’t possibly care what I did with my life, I had no reason to concern myself.
And that worked fine for me for a while, but I’ve never chosen to believe that there was no deity at all. It’s very likely due to having been a Christian in early childhood, but I’ve always had the sense that at the very least there is a thread that connects everything in this world, that there is more than just insanely complicated chemistry inside us.
And I never once had a problem with atheists until I came to the SDMB and met people like Der trihs.
I’d always thought that bigotry and intolerance were the province of the super-religious and the intensely devout. My opinion of atheists was simply that they didn’t want to be beaten about the head and shoulders with religion. They wanted church and state separate, they shrugged off the churchly and made jokes about the overly pious. I never expected to find crusaders for atheism, people who would enter every religious argument they could find, leaping with unholy (heh!) glee on anyone who professed even tolerance of the religious.
Gentle jokes are one thing. Being called a pedophile, an ignorant fool, a fraud, and a con artist is unhelpful.
There are several reasons to post on the SDMB. One of the most often touted is the fighting of ignorance. Fair enough, you say. The religious are ignorant.
All right, you believe that. But throwing those words around isn’t going to convince anyone. Either you’re doing the atheistic equivalent of preaching to the choir or you’re pissing off both atheists and the religious. Maybe you think you’re just calling a spade a spade, but it’s just another variant on the old truism:
When you start yelling, I stop listening.
Living in a very religious (at least on the surface) country I sometimes have the following exchange:
Total stranger: “…are you a believer?”
Martha: “No, I’m not religious/Catholic/Christian”.
TS: “but you believe in God” (said as a statement, not a question).
M: “actually, no”.
TS looks at me in horror as if I’d said “I eat babies”.
This leads me to conclude that believers think that as long as you believe in a deity, you’re acceptable. Anything else is beyond comprehension.
At the same time, I’ve always thought that multi-faith pronouncements by religious leaders were phoney. The monotheistic religious leaders will often say “we all believe in the same God” in public, yet by definition they believe their truth is the only truth and everyone else is an infidel/damned. This is confimed by conversations I’ve had with members of certain faiths.
Amen! I’ve often compared Der Trihs to to fundamentalist like Swaggart and Falwell. My newest suggestion is that we set up a series of debate with Der Trihs and our favorite extreme religious fundamentalists and have a sort of “fundamental off”
The person with the most extreme sweeping generalizations and hateful put downs of large groups wins.