AND YOU ARE PROSELYTIZING TOO!!! In this very thread you’re trying to convince people that your beliefs are correct. (To be more specific, you’re trying go convince A Monkey With a Gun that your beliefs are not stupid.) That’s what people with differing beliefs do!
By equating religion with evil things, you’re just doing the exactly the same thing you hate about “religious people.” What bothers you is that they think you are evil and then do something about that evil. The only thing that keeps you from being as bad is that your viewpoint is not shared by enough people that you could actually do something about it. The viewpoint itself is just as evil.
Religion is merely a group of philosophies shared amongst a group of people. It can’t be inherently bad or good. Hence the quotes in the paragraph above.
The concept that it’s okay to be intolerant to intolerance, when applied to a group of people, is not accurate: it first requires you to make the bigoted statement that all people in a certain group are bad (save for groups that are defined by their badness).
Now, don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with you sharing your views in that one thread, since that’s what it was for. I just find the view itself to be bad. If I were the OP, I’d have opened a GD thread to discuss it rather than pit you for sharing. There’s no reason I could say everything I said above in GD.
Don’t worry. He’s making a point that, just because someone posted the view in the right thread doesn’t mean the OP of this one doesn’t have the right to object.
He’s counting on people knowing that he’d never say something like this.
Color you astonished? Are you telling me that some skin tones are more accepting of astonishment? What color would astonished be anyway? I’m white. Is it acceptable to you that I sometimes have feelings of astonishment? Or do I need to get a tan first before you’re willing to let it slide?
I can’t believe some of the racist shit that’s flying around here these days.
Abe Babe, in your “irony” post above, I think the two parts you quoted - if I’m following YogS. correctly, and I may not be - are pointing out that since ultimately religion does NOT “[not] bother people who don’t believe what you believe” then religion does not follow its own Golden Rule and thus should, in a perfect society, be eliminated.
Of course, we’ll never have perfect societies either. YogSosoth, please feel free to correct my interpretation of your posts. I’m not trying to presume to speak for you; I’m attempting to play the role of interpreter, since I have been both religious and non-religious.
Anyone who believes that religion does, in fact, not “bother people who don’t believe what you believe” is free to pay a quick visit to, oh, say, almost anywhere in the Middle East.
It’s shocking to me that 'dopers have radical (and misguided, if not batshit insane) ideas concerning things like RELIGION! Who would have thought such a thing??
The huge majority of ‘the religious’ do not insist on imposing their views on others. Those who do are assholes, and I don’t like them.
Most atheists don’t insist on denigrating the beliefs of the religious every. single. time. it’s. brought. up. Those who do are, like Yog, assholes, and I don’t like them.
This doesn’t make any sense at all. There’s plenty of things that at lot of people believe that aren’t at all “provable” but are necessary for our society to operate. For instance, one of the things that most people at least claim to believe is that all men are created equal, they may attribute that to a belief in God or to some sort non-religious moral argument, and it’s the basis for our freedoms, that I deserve the same freedoms you do because we’re equal. And yet, that belief isn’t provably true; in fact, I could easily come up with arguments against it. You know that guy who is less intelligent than you are, he’s clearly not equal, maybe he deserves less.
Sure, you can try to say you meant only religious beliefs, but how do you draw any sort of meaningful line about what is and is not related to religion? And why should religion get any sort of treatment in that area that other sources don’t?
Now, I do agree that people generally shouldn’t force their beliefs on others, but it shouldn’t be limited to religious ideas. It’s just as annoying to hear the endless tirades of people wanting to legalize pot or convince people to go vegen or go green or vote for a specific political party or whatever. Why should religious beliefs be treated differently?
Religion doesn’t persecute people, persecution is done in the name of religion by people. Unless you can meaningfully say that all people associated with a certain belief system necessarily believe something, you’re generalizing and prejudging. For instance, sure, a lot of Christians think homosexuality is a sin, but there are some who don’t, and even of those who do, many of them don’t have any issue with legalizing gay marriage and let the sin be between those people and God. It’s not the religion that is persecuting gays, it’s homophobes who use it as an excuse to do it. And painting everyone who associates with the religion as holding that view is no different than judging any other sort of group by the behaviors or beliefs of a subset of that group.
Absolutely laws should be made based upon reasons that make sense for the population as a whole and not a specific religion. But the problem is, you don’t see that you’re doing EXACTLY the same thing against religion for the opposite reason. You want to persecute religious people because of your disdain for religion rather than wanting to persecute people who disagree with some particular religious view. It’s two sides of the same prejudiced coin.
What you’ve espoused isn’t a sign of tolerence. Imagine if you replaced religion with a race instead. “I can live perfectly fine with black people and black people in the world. Sure, I prefer them not be around, but I can tolerate them and leave them alone provided they afford me the same courtesy.” Read that and tell me that’s not racist, and then try to say that saying the same thing about religion is still tolerant. And if that doesn’t work, replace it with something else, like gays.
Tolerance isn’t about just dealing with them because killing them all off or at least shipping them all of to some other place isn’t a real option. If anything its even worse than flat out hating them because it gives the person claiming that the false impression that they actually are tolerant.
And you are upset that other people are using a caricature of your beliefs? Yes, SOME religious people believe essentially that, but I know I don’t believe anything close to that, and I know far more people who would disagree with all of it than with any portion of it. You’re painting a group of billions of people with the beliefs of small fraction of them. Yes, some religious people want to put in place religious laws, but plenty don’t. Hell, there’s plenty of things that religious people and non-religious people agree on that should be illegal, like murder for instance.
But a lot of the laws that people are passing for religious reasons that shouldn’t be passed has a lot less to do with religion than you think. The reason they appeal to religion is because they don’t have another thing to appeal to. For instance, in the past, a lot of people used religion to justify racist laws. Today, the vast majority of religious people wouldn’t hold that view at all.
Or, from the opposite perspective, I’ve met atheists who oppose gay marriage. From one of them, her reasons were that it’s unnatural and “icky” and unnatural things like that should be banned for the same reasons we ban other forms of deviant sex acts. It’s essentially the exact same logic, it’s just an appeal to nature rather than to God.
No, they’re not really at all alike. Abortion is an issue of at what point the child has rights, what those rights should be, and whether or not those rights can trump the mother’s. A lot of people appeal to religion to justify that the child is alive and should have rights from conception, but there are plenty of religious people who are pro-choice, and plenty of people who are not religious who believe that at least some limitations should be placed on abortion because they believe life begins before birth, just not at conception.
Really, it seems to me like you’re ascribing all of these ideas you don’t like to religion and all the ones you agree with to atheism. Atheism isn’t pro-choice, it isn’t pro-life either; it has no opinion on the matter because it has nothing to do with it. All it means is that people who have opinions on it aren’t going to attribute those reasons to God.
Religion isn’t being systematically persecuted, but there are people out there, like you, who have extremely prejudiced and bigotted views about religion. And the idea that you think people should be forcibly converted or killed makes you every bit as bad as all of the religious people who claimed the same thing. You are a hypocrite; you are guilty of EXACTLY the same sort of extremism and hate that you accuse the religious as a whole of.
There’s no irony and no contradiction. People who try to force their beliefs on other people FIRST do not deserve to go uncontested. Its no surprise that some of you could only cut out a small snippet of what I posted, admitted its rambling because it was late and I was tired, and pretend like they distilled the entire argument from 2 lines. It always happens when this issue is raised. So for the interest of clarity and ease, I’ll reduce my entire argument into a couple lines as well:
“People should leave each other alone to believe what they want.”
“However, if you don’t leave other alone, they are within their rights to remove your beliefs as an obstacle to their free expression.”
