I think the original poster meant it seriously. My guess is they're no longer reading as they realized, likely within a few posts, that the rest of the board wasn't agreeing with them.
fifasy wrote:
Religious people harm people all the time though. They brainwash children and make them bully. They encourage their children to bully different religions or atheist kids or the kids who can't afford to be middle class respextable religious people. Religion is very divisive. It is one of the biggest causes of sexism, war and domestic violence. I wish people could see it more.
We tend to be forgiving of certain kinds of posts if they seem uber-naive, especially if we don't know the person's age or the identity of the poster isn't well known.
Why we give more forgiveness to religion bashing than other topics? I don't know, I'd suppose because most people find bashing the low-hanging fruit once in a while within reason while other topics, like holocaust denial, seem harmful in almost any dose immediately to people. Suggesting haldol and straight-jackets might clearly step over that line but again I think tolerance falls back more on the possibility that this could be a very young poster or someone whose just new to these issues.
I think what at least several of us put to rest in this thread early on - religion is much more anchored as a complex sociological phenomena of social code and cultural ideals than the irrational belief in a super being and this is why people don't just assume that the bulk of humanity is schizophrenic and in need of medication, it's a really naive read of the situation. I might add though, as I don't think the universe is necessarily 'dead matter', the concept of egregore is an important one and in a way they project a sort of super being - whether in the memetic sense or even the giant servitor sense - that embodies something like the communal soul of that institution, giving it cohesion and a source of constant reflection back and forth between deity and organization (the Body of Christ and the New Jerusalem as his bride in the Revelation of John comes to mind here as well).
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.