posted
I think you're right with respect to the reason why the phrase was coined, but it is very definitely used since then to indicate that atheists are unpatriotic.
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quote:What's fundamentally broken about religious people, then, that they need to do so?
quote:Or, as the research indicates, everyone has the same basic moral standard and religious people just assume that because their religion claims to provide a moral standard that it must have done so.
When I was on my mission we were supposed to wake up at 6:30am; the first place I stayed I did it every morning without fail because I thought it was right and it was important to me. When I went to the next place I lived in the basement of a couple's house; we wanted to make a good impression so I started doing several things to do just that, including waking up early. The behavior was exactly the same but the reason was different. And the way I know it was different is that when I knew I could wake up later and they wouldn't notice (to my shame) I did.
posted
I think you're just proving the point, Hobbes. There's no real moral reason to get up at 6:30 AM. That's a very specific and arbitrary requirement of an assigned role within the religion, not a moral standard. The underlying principle - obedience - is not one that is itself moral; e.g. you shouldn't be obedient to an evil authority.
Now, most people who make a promise to get up at 6:30 AM every day will agree that it's right for them to keep the promise - but most people wouldn't make that promise without a good reason. What your story tends to demonstrate is that arbitrary standards inculcated by the religion are difficult to uphold.
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quote:Now, most people who make a promise to get up at 6:30 AM every day will agree that it's right for them to keep the promise - but most people wouldn't make that promise without a good reason. What your story tends to demonstrate is that arbitrary standards inculcated by the religion are difficult to uphold.
I think you missed the point, people (or in this case: even the same person) can do the same things for different reasons. It doesn't matter that I would've gotten up at 6:30am without someone watching over me, at the second location I got up for that reason specifically. It doesn't matter if everyone would have exactly the same moral standard with or without religion, for those of us who are religious that is our reason.
As a side not, my story had nothing to do with the fact that I failed later on, just that my reasoning had changed, the fact that I did was merely proof of the change.
quote:I think you're just proving the point, Hobbes. There's no real moral reason to get up at 6:30 AM. That's a very specific and arbitrary requirement of an assigned role within the religion, not a moral standard. The underlying principle - obedience - is not one that is itself moral; e.g. you shouldn't be obedient to an evil authority.
This is the other problem, whose deciding what's moral or not? I think you're aware that to LDS obedience is a moral issue (though it's true you'd have to be specific about obedience to what) and not the same across all people. If your definition of arbitrary is that it isn't universal then of course all non-arbitrary moral positions are universally shared. But even if all moral positions are universal and are equally adhered to by everyone that doesn't mean the reasons are the same.
quote:I also never said people who aren't religious were bad people, but don't let that fact stop you from claiming I said it.
Kwea, I think it's at least as legitimate to interpret
quote:[Religion] gives us a moral standard, particularly when we are young, to help us develop as people. We are not machines.
as an insult against the moral fiber of non-religious people as it is to interpet "Religious people are delusional" as an insult against the intellectual integrity of religious people. Honestly I don't even know how you'd interpret it to mean something other than "being religious makes you more moral and less machinelike," and both of those are conditions translate pretty directly to "bad" in most people's minds.
And as noted, "being delusional" doesn't even necessarily carry negative conotations, whereas being "less moral" almost always does.
You really do not have the high ground here.
Bull.
I was talking about a subsection of people.....the religious one.....who use those teachings as a guide to their behavior. I never said, or implied, that atheists weren't moral, or didn't have their own ways of teaching morality to their children. If YOU read that into my statement, it shows me a couple of things.
First, it shows me you have no idea of who I am, or what I believe. That is't shocking, as we basically interact though an online forum.
The second thing it shows me is some of YOUR assumptions regarding other people. You assumed that's what I meant because that is how you read it, or you expected that to be what I meant.
We are NOT machines. We can't just have input directly entered into our brains as a command line. Religion helped ME learn about how to be a better person when I grew up, and the stories I was told helped me develop a moral sense of right and wrong that has served ME well. OTHER PEOPLE have different religions, beliefs, and ways of raising their children.....NONE of which invalidates MY upbringing.
I still find the comparison to a broken leg or a virus to be belittling and insulting, regardless of the excuses why it was said. Funny how people can ignore actual statements, yet read unintended meanings into my actual statements and get offended. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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(@Hobbes) OK, I may have missed your point. Still, I'd like to see you look at something at a lower level (not a rule justified by a behavioral system justified by a goal justified by...(etc)...a moral principle), to demonstrate that morality is derived from religion, rather than rationalized by it.
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I don't think I understand what you're asking for, can you clarify?
Though even then I thought this discussion was about if religious people act out a specific morality because of their religion, which is what I was trying to prove, so maybe my confusion comes from not knowing exactly what you’re arguing here?
quote:The second thing it shows me is some of YOUR assumptions regarding other people. You assumed that's what I meant because that is how you read it, or you expected that to be what I meant.
I don't know how to take this seriously given that you were the one who started by taking offense at something that wasn't intended to be offensive. I realize that it is common for jerk-atheists to deride religious people as stupid and backward. It is just as common (probably moreso when you're talking about sheer numbers, about the same when you account for demographic ratios) for religious people to deride atheists as immoral and machinelike.
Your statement is EXACTLY the kind that is made by religious people to disparage atheists all the time. And maybe you didn't intend it that way, but to sit there and say "You are obviously being deliberately offensive whereas I am merely making valid points that you are refusing to understand" is hypocritical, undermining the point you are trying to make.
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quote:Originally posted by Hobbes: I don't think I understand what you're asking for, can you clarify?
Though even then I thought this discussion was about if religious people act out a specific morality because of their religion, which is what I was trying to prove, so maybe my confusion comes from not knowing exactly what you’re arguing here?
Hobbes
What you've demonstrated is that the immediate reasons for following a rule can vary. Following that rule may be considered moral, but it's a bit too removed from the moral principles involved to make the example useful for a demonstration of how the religion imparted the morality.
If you could examine why people don't steal, or why they don't kill people, it might be a better case for whether the morality is really received from the religious teaching, or the religion merely puts some packaging around practically universal morals. (In other words, what I suspect is that the reasons why we don't kill or steal might be universal, unlike reasons for higher order extrapolations from moral principles.)
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quote:What you've demonstrated is that the immediate reasons for following a rule can vary.
Put another way, the proximate moral principal in the two waking up early examples wasn't "wake up early." In one case it was "be obedient" and in the other it was "impress hosts/neighbors" and each of those may be further removed from the core moral inclinations at their root.
So it's not a case of one moral behavior driven by two different justifications, but the expression of two different moral inclinations that happen to result in the same behavior.
Church teaches obedience but is it church that made you value obedience in the first place, or is an inclination towards obedience something that religion merely co-opted?
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quote:Your statement is EXACTLY the kind that is made by religious people to disparage atheists all the time. And maybe you didn't intend it that way, but to sit there and say "You are obviously being deliberately offensive whereas I am merely making valid points that you are refusing to understand" is hypocritical, undermining the point you are trying to make.
You are skipping over the critical distinction: there is a difference between me talking about me and me talking about you. To say *YOU* are immoral is a lot more offensive than to say *I* require religion to be moral. To say theists are delusional is a lot more offensive to theists than to say I see no evidence for theism. The two may infer the same thing, but if you say it in a way that directly passes judgement on the character or intelligence of the other person, it's going to cause more offense. That's mostly because attacking the other person directly seems to imply you think you are in a position to judge them, rather than an equal co-participant in the conversation who could just as easily be mistaken.
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While I realize, having went back to read it fourth time, what Kwea meant when he said
quote:Religion, to me and many other people, is the reason WHY we want to be able to do these things. It gives us a moral standard, particularly when we are young, to help us develop as people. We are not machines."
It honestly took me several read throughs to look past the common implication of "people who don't do what we do are less moral and more machinelike." It's the machinelike that particularly throws me - it's meaning is not clarified at all, it feels tacked on at the end and the only purpose I could see for it is to help reinforce the implication. Even now, I'm not really sure how it helps his point. When did anyone ever imply he was machinelike and why was it necessary to clarify that he was not?
Given how I was interpreting it, the distinction I was talking about doesn't exist.
On the flipside, the thing that atheists often leave out of the "virus" metaphor (sometimes deliberately, sometimes out of ignorance of what meme theory actually says, sometimes maliciously, but sometimes simply because they are lazy or honestly thought it was implied) is that atheism is ALSO a virus. All ideas are.
And as far as delusions go, as noted before, it is inherently implied by stating "my religion is true" that all other religions are not. You can avoid saying the word "delusional" if you consider it impolite, but the implication is there anyway. From my perspective, I'm not saying anything that religious people haven't already implied.
There are plenty of rude, obnoxious atheists out there, who go out of their way to ridicule religion at the slightest provocation. I have been guilty of that from time to time. But once a serious discussion about it is taking place, saying "So far religious people have presented no compelling evidence that there is an Abrahamic God out there, so the most likely conclusion for me to draw is that people believing such a God are delusional" is a perfectly legitimate statement.
I believe that religion has often been used as a tool for good, and that there are some people who genuinely need it. But I believe most people people who think they *need* religion to be moral and happy are mistaken - without religion they would have found a different way to be moral and happy. I believe that making moral decisions naturally lead to greater happiness - that we associate things with "goodness" because they are genuinely good both for the world as a whole and for us in particular. Even if at specific times they may seem inconvenient, humans are intelligent enough to learn to do them anyway for greater, longterm gain.
At the same time, I believe that the political infrastructure that comes with organized religion is dangerous. It's not inherently bad, but the lack of a check for objective analysis opens the doors for a few bad people to take advantage of a lot of good people, or for a few well-meaning but misguided people to take advantage of each other.
I don't think it is necessary or practical to go out of my way to try and stamp out religion as I know it, but I do think the world would be a better place without it. And in the context of a conversation where we are already talking about the value of religion, I do not feel the need to apologize for that.
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I'll correct myself from earlier. We weren't founded as a "Christian" nation but our founders sought a nation of religious freedom. When they spoke of religious freedom, I doubt they conceptualized the possibility of an atheist nation. Our nation was founded on the belief of God. Hindu, Budhist, Christian, Jewish or Muslim god. Our founders failed to perceive a future where people would not at a minimum, believe in god. The old arguments weren't about God, they were about the interpretation of God. Our founders wanted to prevent one interpretation from oppressing another.
They realized there were different beliefs and wanted to protect the right to believe differently. This protection has been twisted. We have freedom "of" religion not "from" religion. Their principles protect the atheist, Christian and Jew.
In my opinion, Atheism is a "theism". An atheist who takes legal action to remove a christian symbol is no different than a Christian who would sue to remove a Jewish symbol. An atheist can be the instigator of religious persecution. Religious freedom is a freedom of the individual, not the society. There can be no societal dictates,...ie no prayer in public. Laws stating their shall be no prayer are no different than laws that say their must be prayer.
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: We are NOT machines. We can't just have input directly entered into our brains as a command line.
What if I say that we ARE machines, we just have a sloppy GUI that doesn't always work the way we want it to, and we don't (yet) have access to the command line?
Religion is one way to input information that one hopes will produce good results, but religion is really bloated code. Instead of just saying, "Hey, treat others nicely" it adds a bunch of other stuff into the message that confuses it and can lead to undesired or at least unintended behaviors.
If we can't get to the command line, at least we should try to minimize the messy inputs.
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: Laws stating their shall be no prayer are no different than laws that say their must be prayer.
Is that the same way that laws saying I can't punch you are no different from laws that say I must punch you?
Because they seem really different to me.
You're neglecting the "individual" freedom part. I have a right not to be punched but you have a right to self defense. Do atheist feel assaulted by a religious symbol or optional group prayer in a public place? I know Muslim's take Jewish and Christian symbols as offense in the middle east. There, religious persecution of Muslim over Infidel is normal. There, Islam forbids other symbols. Of course we will all accept this as persecution since it is one religion over another. In America we have movements to remove all religious symbols from the public arena. Is this any different?
If school student's want to pray together, they have that right. No student should be forced to participate. Lawsuits have been waged to prevent prayer of athletes prior to football games...why? The muslim could pray in his own way and the atheist wasn't forced to participate? Even the atheist will accept a moment of silence and reflection.
Our nation has moved away from the rights of the individual to the rights of society. I believe in individual freedom. The arguments of "Mother Russia" have proven tyrannical. We are not a nation of what is best for society, we are a nation of individual rights. You have a right to worship an oak tree and I can't demand all oak trees be cut down as offensive to my beliefs. As a Christian, could I bring suit to have all oak trees removed from public land? Let any and all religions, or lack there of, be freely expressed.....especially on public land. Public property symbolizes our individual freedom. As an individual, on public property is the only place we all have a right to tread. (public = government)
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malanthrop: I believe in individual freedom too. Individuals can pray quietly to themselves, they can't organize group prayers or hang their religious symbols in public buildings.
You have the right not to be punched in the face, I have the right not to have to sit through a prayer session at the beginning of a city meeting, or a public school graduation.
I never see Christians defending the right of Muslims or Scientologists or Church of Odin practitioners to lead a public school prayer before the basketball game.
I'd be happy to lead some prayers that are offensive to Christians. Let's see how the "individual" freedoms hold up to that.
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: I believe in individual freedom too. Individuals can pray quietly to themselves, they can't organize group prayers or hang their religious symbols in public buildings.
But atheists can congregate in groups, hang their signs of protest and congregate in opposition of religion.....in PUBLIC PLACES.
Perhaps the atheist should meditate quietly to themselves in opposition to the christian, then we'll all be on equal ground.
Atheism is a theism under the law.
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: Atheism is a theism under the law.
Now you're just being silly.
Christians can protest under the law just as equally as atheists.
Atheists can't post a sign in a classroom that says "Rule 1. Christians are Wrong. Rule 2. Atheists RULE!"
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The supreme court of the United States still has the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall.
I'm not saying atheists are wrong. I'm saying public spaces are open to the Koran, the Star of David, the Bible, and you can look at an empty wall to see atheism.
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: and you can look at an empty wall to see atheism.
Again, you're not really arguing anything here. You can look at an empty wall and see anti-Americanism, because there isn't a flag there.
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: An empty wall should be agnosticism, maybe a transparent wall would be atheism
Atheism would be an open door that everyone else in the room refuses to walk through because they insist that it's closed. Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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You can't argue my acceptance of all religions represented on the wall of a public space....which I completely support. Public spaces should represent the people and their individual rights. If a Christian came out and demanded the removal of the Star of David, you would call it persecution. A type of religious persecution that occurs all over the world. Calling for the removal of all religion is the same - even worse type of persecution.
I'm an extreme, right wing, conservative, born again christian, Iraq war vet defending the rights of American Muslims to represent their beliefs in a public place. I'm suppose to be the intolerant, racist, right wing nut-job. In reality I judge the individual and believe in individual freedom.
The supposed "intolerant" christian such as myself is far more tolerant of other religions sharing the public space on the basis of "individual freedom" than you. You would prefer the expulsion of all religions. I accept your right to believe as you do with equal access to public spaces.
The "state" is us and we are from very diverse backgrounds. Your atheist separation of church and state mentality is just as intolerant as Sharia Law. American Christians, Jews and Muslims aren't offended by each others symbols in a public place. In many ways, we have achieved the dreams of our founders. Religions in America have learned to coexist. Unfortunately our founders didn't foresee the intolerance of the atheist.
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Who is upset at this and suing for that in a public place?
Muslims suing Jews over the star? Christians over the Koran? Jews over the Bible?
Always the atheists who don't want to be offended by religion.
For thousands of years the different believers were at war. A nation was founded where they could peacefully coexist on the basis of individual freedom, but non-believers arose to oppose them all.
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: A nation was founded where they could peacefully coexist on the basis of individual freedom, but non-believers arose to oppose them all.
Yep, there's the other one. Thanks! Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: Always the atheists who don't want to be offended by religion.
Actually, I'd prefer that my tax money doesn't go to pay for symbols and monuments. Particularly ones that represent groups that think I deserve bad treatment. (If not bad treatment from the members, from the deity they believe in.)
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: The supreme court of the United States still has the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall.
Of course you say this like it's a good thing, but I disagree. Even as a christian I disagree.
The 10 commandments have no place in a building that is supposed to judge by the laws of the nation. The implication of placing the commandments in this building are that they are somehow relevant to the function of the building. They're not. It would be downright scary if the US courts decided to try to enforce some of them... my son talked back to me today so maybe I should call and have him arrested...?
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quote:The supreme court of the United States still has the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall.
I would argue, by the way, to those people who sometimes wonder why atheists make a stink about this sort of thing, or why atheists are so "unreasonable" about getting "under God" out of the Pledge and off our money, that Mal's quote above is actually an excellent example: because those quotes are not there to represent the virtue of a given idea (especially in the case of something like "under God"), but rather to legitimize the claim that ours is a Christian nation. As long as someone like Mal can point to the Ten Commandments on a courthouse wall as justification for the idea that atheists are simply non grata, I will argue that the Ten Commandments should come off that wall.
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: Atheism would be an open door that everyone else in the room refuses to walk through because they insist that it's closed.
A blank wall is not atheism just as not praying isn't atheism. What you are describing is secularism - the absence of religious commentary either way.
A statement that religion is false would be an atheistic equivalent to a prayer and such statements are illegal in all of the same circumstances in which a prayer is illegal.
The mere absence of promotion is not opposition, it's neutrality.
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quote:The supreme court of the United States still has the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall.
I would argue, by the way, to those people who sometimes wonder why atheists make a stink about this sort of thing, or why atheists are so "unreasonable" about getting "under God" out of the Pledge and off our money, that Mal's quote above is actually an excellent example: because those quotes are not there to represent the virtue of a given idea (especially in the case of something like "under God"), but rather to legitimize the claim that ours is a Christian nation. As long as someone like Mal can point to the Ten Commandments on a courthouse wall as justification for the idea that atheists are simply non grata, I will argue that the Ten Commandments should come off that wall.
I gotta agree wholeheartedly.
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quote:Scifi: What you've demonstrated is that the immediate reasons for following a rule can vary. Following that rule may be considered moral, but it's a bit too removed from the moral principles involved to make the example useful for a demonstration of how the religion imparted the morality.
quote:MattP: So it's not a case of one moral behavior driven by two different justifications, but the expression of two different moral inclinations that happen to result in the same behavior.
Church teaches obedience but is it church that made you value obedience in the first place, or is an inclination towards obedience something that religion merely co-opted?
I feel like you're trying to get me to argue my side of the straw man I got into this to tear down. Even if I had some proof (i.e. studies) that religion actually created a moral structure without on existing independent of it, then that would be the big opportunity to pull out the argument that non-religious people are moral (or accuse me of saying they aren't, depending on whose responding). This is even more off the mark since many religions, including mine, believe that people do have an inherent moral compass and religion adds definition as opposed to creating it in a vacuum.
What was said originally (clarity aside, I think it became clear later even if the first post wasn't) was that religious people (can/try to) act morally because of their religion. It doesn't matter if there was a tendency to do so already, if I'm faced with the choice of taking a wallet left out in the open and I don't because I think about the consequences in my religion, then I acted morally because of my religion. The fact that others would also act morally without that reason, or even that I would absent religion doesn't change my reasoning path having gone through religion.
A blank wall is not atheism just as not praying isn't atheism. What you are describing is secularism - the absence of religious commentary either way.
A statement that religion is false would be an atheistic equivalent to a prayer and such statements are illegal in all of the same circumstances in which a prayer is illegal.
The mere absence of promotion is not opposition, it's neutrality.
I guess the difficulty for many believers is that a purely neutral government on the surface appears exactly as a government that was atheist appears, in other words no mention of religion at all. In fact, out right hostility towards anyone mentioning religion would be the order of the day.
It would be like having a door, one group believes the door can be opened, so it should be opened, and people permitted to walk through it. The other says it can be closed, and so it should remain closed as people get too excited and irrational trying to figure out the nature of the door that apparently does nothing.
A secular government would say we aren't going to discuss the door, which is very much akin to what would happen if the door was simply boarded up and ignored.
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I'm not sure that a secular government must necessarily take the form of not ever talking about religion. I can see one where it is done and isn't that big a deal.
In America, I think the drive towards secularism is one towards removing all references to religion has taken the form is has in large part because of the actions of a large number of religious, specifically Christian, people who want to push their religion on other people. In the face of this, I don't really see a way to achieve secularism without insisting on the absence of religion in official contexts.
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quote:I guess the difficulty for many believers is that a purely neutral government on the surface appears exactly as a government that was atheist appears, in other words no mention of religion at all. In fact, out right hostility towards anyone mentioning religion would be the order of the day.
It really depends on the nature of the religious mentions. If I had my way, group prayer as a part of official meetings would be out. Religious officials meeting together privately to pray prior to the official meeting would be OK with me. Biblical quotations installed in public buildings would be out. A Senator quoting the Bible would not be prohibited.
In short, individuals would be able to express and follow their religious beliefs. My goal would be to secularize the institutions of government. (I personally would also like a constitutional amendment that requires a secular basis for legislation, so that laws with a purely religious basis - such as prohibiting certain activities only on the Sabbath - could be ruled unconstitutional if challenged. But that's going beyond my view that there are some Establishment problems with institutional prayer and religious quotations in our government.)
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quote:I guess the difficulty for many believers is that a purely neutral government on the surface appears exactly as a government that was atheist appears, in other words no mention of religion at all. In fact, out right hostility towards anyone mentioning religion would be the order of the day.
It really depends on the nature of the religious mentions. If I had my way, group prayer as a part of official meetings would be out. Religious officials meeting together privately to pray prior to the official meeting would be OK with me. Biblical quotations installed in public buildings would be out. A Senator quoting the Bible would not be prohibited.
In short, individuals would be able to express and follow their religious beliefs. My goal would be to secularize the institutions of government. (I personally would also like a constitutional amendment that requires a secular basis for legislation, so that laws with a purely religious basis - such as prohibiting certain activities only on the Sabbath - could be ruled unconstitutional if challenged. But that's going beyond my view that there are some Establishment problems with institutional prayer and religious quotations in our government.)
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posted
Or more accurately, that there are dozens of doors, and that preference ought not to be given to one or two of them.
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quote:I guess the difficulty for many believers is that a purely neutral government on the surface appears exactly as a government that was atheist appears
That fact that atheists are generally better behaved in refraining from proactively making religious statements where they may not be appropriate shouldn't result in an equivalence between no statement and an atheistic one.
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quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: I'm not sure that a secular government must necessarily take the form of not ever talking about religion. I can see one where it is done and isn't that big a deal.
Here's one, secular, although it's still a bit of a "deal":
quote:The parents, whose children attend schools in the des Draveurs school board, wanted their kids exempted after Quebec expanded the Grade 1 to Grade 11 curriculum to include religions other than Catholicism, as well as ethics and social justice, starting this fall.
...
Marc-André Richard said the school board has just started a war with parents like himself.
He said he is worried that if his kids learn about other religions on top of Catholicism, they will become confused by too many choices.
quote:Originally posted by scifibum: If I had my way, group prayer as a part of official meetings would be out. Religious officials meeting together privately to pray prior to the official meeting would be OK with me.
That seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
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quote:Originally posted by Juxtapose: Or more accurately, that there are dozens of doors, and that preference ought not to be given to one or two of them.
Not really the point of my analogy, and as you probably know, no analogy is perfect.
scifibum: I could live with that society. I just think alot of believers (sorry to use the F word) fear that that is what taking down public displays of religion on government institutions leads to. Of course they don't spend alot of time thinking about what it means to atheists when they call America a "Christian Nation" but there it is.
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quote: Of course they don't spend alot of time thinking about what it means to atheists when they call America a "Christian Nation" but there it is.
I don't think that is true. I think that calling America a "Christian Nation" is often aimed very much at making non-Christians feel unwelcome or second-class.
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quote:The second thing it shows me is some of YOUR assumptions regarding other people. You assumed that's what I meant because that is how you read it, or you expected that to be what I meant.
I don't know how to take this seriously given that you were the one who started by taking offense at something that wasn't intended to be offensive. I realize that it is common for jerk-atheists to deride religious people as stupid and backward. It is just as common (probably moreso when you're talking about sheer numbers, about the same when you account for demographic ratios) for religious people to deride atheists as immoral and machinelike.
Your statement is EXACTLY the kind that is made by religious people to disparage atheists all the time. And maybe you didn't intend it that way, but to sit there and say "You are obviously being deliberately offensive whereas I am merely making valid points that you are refusing to understand" is hypocritical, undermining the point you are trying to make.
So there is no difference between taking offense as being called delusional and adding statements to someone else's posts that they didn't make and then taking offense at the "new and improved" argument? I never said a single thing about people who didn't believe the same as I do. I never made any sort of claim about people who don't believe in God at all.
I didn't assume someone called my beliefs delusions. They did. And it is offensive, regardless of how it was intended......or how people now claim it was intended.
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: So there is no difference between taking offense as being called delusional and adding statements to someone else's posts that they didn't make and then taking offense at the "new and improved" argument?
While you didn't make the exact statements, you made the implication, intentionally or not.
The fact that you don't realize how your statements can be offensive to others is no different from how you can take offense at someone else saying that religion is a delusion.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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quote: Of course they don't spend alot of time thinking about what it means to atheists when they call America a "Christian Nation" but there it is.
I don't think that is true. I think that calling America a "Christian Nation" is often aimed very much at making non-Christians feel unwelcome or second-class.
It is when it is used within the context of somebody asserting that America needs to be more secular.
I should think that just as often it's used as a means of shoring up confidence amongst the religious when they discuss patriotism.
I think it's a poor practice when used the way you describe, but I'm not going to attempt to denigrate it enough that you feel satisfied.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:So there is no difference between taking offense as being called delusional and adding statements to someone else's posts that they didn't make and then taking offense at the "new and improved" argument?
MightyCow pretty much covered this, but your statements really were not as clear as you thought they were and loaded with terminology that has traditionally be used to marginalize atheists. If you don't care about the (sometimes) implied context surrounding the world delusional or virus, I don't see why I should care that you didn't mean to include the baggage your statement carried.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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