Many people on here got offended by my post but I'm using a different approach & think the rude people are hilarious (in a bad way) and don't understand a "meme joke." People need reality checks from how others treat religious people, ASIDE from this website & SOMETIMES on here also. Yes it's fake, yes it's obviously not real, and I have been just as rude to religious people. But now it's catching to me and I started to feel bad. If you're going around acting like the Westboro Baptist church, it's different. If you believe there's an invisible man in sky HARMLESSLY and try to be a good person, I think it's mean to act like you're so much better than them, make mean remarks, and treat them like their less of a person.
I also work in Human Services and I am taught to be culturally competent towards other people's beliefs. Self righteousness is one of the biggest things I actually do hate in this world and I don't really hate many things.
Anyways, I hope everyone has a wonderful day!
Just like i won't get into your sex life or your relationships with your parents when I meet you, so I won't go into your religious beliefs. If you insist on foisting them on me, I will openly and frankly let you know mine. And that's where it all goes pearshaped.
Make small talk with me, use your indoor voice or you will not be happy at the end.
I will agree with you on at least one point. It seems to be human nature to tend towards self righteousness and the desire to be or feel superior to their neighbors, regardless of the reason. It's not always religious. It's certainly not new.
I do feel superior to the religious bent. Is it right? I don't know. But I do because I feel the very fact I can turn my back on superstition and recognize reason puts me in a higher bracket.
I put a great deal of thought and effort into understanding where a person is coming from. From understanding comes tolerance. But I'm pretty much out of religious tolerance these days.
Hmm, smug because you are rational and have evidence based thinking or smug because you follow bat shit crazy dogma? Maybe smug isn't a good trait but is appropriate here. Maybe not so much in a church.
So I've been thinking about creating this imaginary friend I like to call BOB. He's really powerful but he is much too cool to use that power to help me out in the real world, or help anybody else out for that matter but like I said, BOB is REALLY COOL! BOB is so COOL even though he knows everything before it even happens (did I mention that BOB created the Universe too?) he feels that it would be very uncool to get in the way of bad things that are going to happen so he just lets people get sick, injured and killed in horrible ways, apparently it's a thing with BOB.
Now please understand that while my imaginary friend BOB is SUPER UBER COOL, he does have some hangups about masturbation, sex out of wedlock, non-straight sex and SHRIMP - Holy Mother of BOB, he just freaks out about shrimp, or at least he used to before we figured out refrigeration on our own (BOB not wanting to intervene in our lives of course, except about a bunch of other things). So please understand that if you don't want to believe in my imaginary friend BOB then that is perfectly cool but I may have to kill you and your family and friends and your livestock etc. etc. because, well, you know, BOB told me to do it.
I know you will appreciate that I am just expressing my cultural beliefs so you won't mind being burned at the stake because BOB just loves the smell rising up from a burnt offering.
Love your comment....when my religious friends ask me if I believe in Jesus I tell them that I think he may have been a very real person who lived a very long time ago and was apparently interesting and charming enough to amass a following of people who loved to listen to him spin his yarns and give them tiny rays of hope in their otherwise bleak existence.....his "homies" followed him around everywhere he went....(the original DeadHeads?) and eventually he managed to piss off enough powerful people to get himself "silenced" for good.
The next sound I hear is usually someone's head exploding....
Lavergne - I have long held the belief that the Jesus myth was based on a few men over the course of several life times and that with the passage of time it took on its own mythology. What happened later was mostly about profiteering and control but the basic message had some very forward thinking ideas for that period of our history.
@ToolGuy, thanks for being my wingman on this one.
Maybe it's that we have been exhaustingly tolerant of religious people and their rhetoric, so we joined agnostic.com as a place of refuge from that bullshit.
A post about anyone's judgement here, regarding views on religion, belongs on an actual self righteous website.
Hey, you should join one of those!
Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes (some) people smile. Mahmoud Darwish Words in parenthesis mine.
"Self-rightious" seems to be a term that contradicts it's own common defination. Simply, self righteous means excessively or hypocritically pious. Pious meaning:having or showing or expressing reverence for a deity.
Being former Christian, I know it is taught that Christians are not righteous because of any thing they do but because of what is said Jesus did. So, a Christian's "righteous " is not of their self.
From the Christian point of view a person would be "righteous " but not of, or because of their own "self".
Where as many illogical atheist that enjoy sarcasm worship of the non-existent flying spaghetti monster sky God, would seem to me to be more "self" motivated in their sarcasm worship to the non-existent flying spaghetti monster sky God by the way of making sarcasm fun of those that claim their righteous is from their deity and not themselves.
I replied to your post, "Some atheists can be just as self righteous and judgmental as religious people. Change my mind."
It appears you were challenging atheists, trying to upset us.
Next time, please be more kind.
Full disclosure - I don't know what post it was. I see most and, I can tell you, I wasn't offended. Only trolls offend me, and you are not one.
I didn't get offended, however I did find it dumb. But then again, I've grown tired of all the "change my mind" post that I've seen lately because the writer/s didn't really want anyone to change their mind; they just want to poke the hornet's nest.
I didn't respond because I didn't see the need. If I misinterpreted it, I apologize
You did (perhaps mistakenly?) connect Culture with Religion. Maybe Human Services neglected to teach you that. But it's a baby step. Keep learning Sista.
@Gwendolyn2018 Absolutely. Most Americans are Christian because they were born in America. Most Iranians are Muslim because they were born in Iran. Far more influential than any inherent or acquired belief
@Gwendolyn2018 It was a question meant for the OP
First do not mistake disagreement with being offended.
Also, I do not think it is "harmless". People who allow illusions to cloud their judgment are dangerous. As I said in a previous post on another thread:
If you live in a residential neighborhood, you have kids, and some clown comes barreling down the street at 90 mph, even if he is your friend, you are going to get pissed off an call him out for his bad behavior . . . That does not necessarily guarantee an end to your friendship, but it certainly has that potential.
This analogy is just as relevant to other forms of dangerous behavior. Granted, it is possible that a friend may just not see that what they are doing is destructive, but it sure is not acceptable to me to let someone going on being destructive . . . What I see on a world-wide scale, (and there are pretty large majority of American ostriches sticking their heads in the sand on this issue) is people who are supporting "patriotism", wars, illegal actions in other countries, for example the bombing of the Libyan water supply, the use of depleted uranium in weapons, white phosphorous, promotion of unjustified wars, support for Israel, which is one of the most racist countries in the world, and have you ever noticed how whenever the USA is bombing a country, it is never a country with people who have white skin and always a different culture? Iraq . . . . roughly one million people killed . . . . and much suffering afterward as a result of depleted uranium use in weapons. And who is it that votes these crazy, war-loving christians into office, and how many times have you seen a major church leader stand up against all the illegal wars?
Unfortunately, to the vast majority of Americans, these things . . . are things that they seem to think are nothing more significant than watching a war movie, with just as much indifference and nonchalance. Add to this, the belief that many of these people hold with regard to "end times", where many believe that they can actually instigate the second coming via helping Israel to the point of rebuilding the temple and also by war, their complete disregard for the environment, and you can bet that if I have a friend, s/he is going to get tested on these things, because as I see it, it is worse than the idiot driving through your neighborhood at 90 mph. Just the other day, I saw an article about how in Syria, an American military vehicle attempted to run a Russian military vehicle off the road . . . . the USA has no business whatsoever in Syria, they were not invited in, they invaded, and if you look up the UN reports on the so-called poison gas claims, you will not find one sliver of substantiation of the claim that Assad used poisonous gas . . . it was all an excuse for the US to interfere, just like country after country that can be named, and what most people fail to see is that if they do not stop this out-of-control terrorist organization in Washington, they are going to wake up to a day . . . . when we are entering into a new world war . . . . and if that is not driving at 90 mph down a dead end street, I do not know what is . . . . . people are not thinking of their children's future, they think all the wars will end, they will then go back to what they were doing beforehand, but most likely scenario is that if it comes to all-out war, . . . . it will end in multiple huge nuclear blasts . . . followed by a very long silence.
People who allow their judgment to be clouded by illusions are a big part of what is wrong with the world today, and the contribute to the mass murder, extreme injustice, coups, economic warfare, and all of the above-mentioned behaviors that are carried out by our government, and, if you can watch a person going 90 miles an hour down a residential street with children and do nothing about it, or watch our government doing what it has been doing, and say nothing about it, or worse yet . . . . support it, you can bet your bottom dollar that the last thing I would call it is "harmless", and I will not stand on the sidelines while someone enables that kind of behavior, simply because they allow illusions to cloud their judgment.
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Christians believe that certain people will burn in hell. When you dehumanize other people, and picture them as being unworthy, i.e. ("do not throw your pearls before swine" direct quote from their idol), "swine"? . . . that is clearly and unambiguously a form of hate. Why not seek what is best for ALL of mankind, the World as a whole, all races, all cultures, rather than being divisive? It's not harmless. . . .
Thank you Archeus. The world is STILL getting its rewards for respect for belief and tolerance of religion. And it still upsets people on this website . Perhaps those that are upset should be reading up on History and pay less mind to websites.