Ending Hate Against People of Faith on this Forum

Post Reply New Topic

that s so pathetic ...
stop it all of u ....

u r not better than NTs.

Lets all get along now children!

A person growing up in a Christian home might rebell. I know one guy that did and turned athiest, sort of drove his parents bonkers. He's serving in Iraq now.

Lying is the deliberate telling of mistruth - such as the vicious slur of declaring ANY passing on of what is believed to be true equal to child abuse. Child abuse is a very serious violation, it should not be belittled by using it loosely.

Sorry about your unfortunate experience growing up in the cult. I do not know that hate as such is justified (though it may certainly be understandable in some instances); if you believe something to be not only false but potentially or actually harmful then present your reasons and seek to persuade us (Christians, or any other group you sincerely believe to be misguided) of our error; after all many of us are seeking to do the same.

In the mean time, strive to be courteous and respectful. If someone is actually being a bully or otherwise offending decency confront and rebuke them for it, but do not draw unjustified generalisations about their whole faith community. The sort of "logic" used in the demonisation of any group (by demonisation I do not mean any criticism or rebuke whatever, but rather treating a whole group as inherently evil based on selective history and at times outright lies) would taken to its logical extreme culminate in thinking that no humans can be trusted; it is seldom taken so far, instead idolising one group and demonising another. Demonisation is not only an extreme form of judgementalism and inverted idolatry but historically has frequently led to persecution, which is not only wrong in itself, but tends to lead to martyr complexes and siege mentalities, which when there is the almost inevitable shift in power frequently leads to more persecution, and so on, as in far too much of human history.

AlexandertheSolitary, this thread is almost 9-years-old----NOT that it isn't a relevant topic, it's just that the person you quoted may not respond to you.....

Someone else might be interested in continuing the topic; its fairly perennial. Still, I take your point.

This is a topic where nobody wins and talking about just makes everything worse.

Now then, you seem like a sufficiently sincere and articulate individual for this to be interesting, so I'll give it a whirl. My name is Daniel, and I'm an atheist (with vegan and crossfitting friends, so laughs in triplicate for the previous post ), a secular humanist and a rational, I've been registered on this forum before, years ago, and what better way to get back in than jumping into a potentially heated debate... .As for the faith-issue, I believe holy texts belong in literature class, to be analyzed in their context, and not given relevance outside of it. Saying "the bible says X" means the same as "Superstitious bronze-age tribesmen in palestine thought X"

When asked "how do you know they're lying" in response to his assertion that priests lie to children and the dying for a living, Christopher Hitchens replied "because the person saying it cannot possibly know it to be true." Stating as fact that which is not evidently true comes pretty close to deliberately telling untruth in my view.

What is that old jesuit saying? " 'Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man" or something to that effect. Now, putting aside the fact that ideas solid enough to stand up to reasoned scrutiny wouldn't have to take root in an individual before the "age of reason" (typically around 8 years old), does it not seem disingenuous on your part to equate benign tenets of faith, such as "do unto others etc." with positively abhorrent tenets of faith, such as the belief in people recieving eternal torture for a long list of transgressions, and gather them under an umbrella-argument that "(Other side) declaring ANY passing on of what is believed to be true equal to child abuse."? Do you not imagine a child growing up genuinely believing in hell, and then one day finding themsleves guilty of such a transgression, is in true emotional and psychological anguish? To think otherwhise is in my submission a failure of imagination on your part, and to suggest that calling it child abuse to inflict that on a child would be belittling the term seems itelf to be belittling.




Now here is where it gets messy. It's very hard to argue against, for instance, christians, because not all christians believe even remotely the same things. There are catholics (who believe in the absurdly undefined concept of the trinity), there are unitarians (who don't), there are anglicans (who I don't know what they believe, their church was created so the king could have a divorce), gnostics (who assert that they know things they merely believe), agnostics (who assert that what they believe is inherently unknowable), baptists, pentacostals, Jehovah's witnesses, mormons (who believe in what is essentially a documented scam) and there's even a minority christian grouping in india who believe that Jesus wasn't assumed into heaven but instead flew to India on a stone slab, and they have the footprinted slab to prove it. In the light of all that, what do "christians" belive?




Now, please understand that I mean you no ill on a personal level, but also do try to see my side; the phrase "please respect my faith" can, from my perspective, mean anything from "please let me light candles and imagine things in the solitude of my own mind" to "stop infringing on my right to mutilate babies.". I don't belive that people of faith are evil. I don't even believe that most people of faith believe some of the things they say they belive, but I pay them the respect of assuming that they do and argue on that basis. Furthermore, please understand that I and people like me are just as passionate about our unbelief and, perhaps more importantly: our convictions based on reason, logic and humanity, as are believers in theirs. Our lack of supernatural belief more often than not seems to translate, in the mind of the faithful, into a nihilistic belief in nothing for which very few, if any, of the people in my camp will stand, and that is just as insulting as people on my side defaulting to the worst beliefs of the faithful, if not worse.

(apologies for the abrupt ending, but I need to sleep. until next time, good night! )

I don't have a problem with anyone's religious beliefs, so long as the person doesn't use it as an excuse to infringe on human rights or do harm.

That's a defeatist attitude... I don't think there's any problem in history that was ever improved (let alone solved) by declining to talk about it.