Telling them to shut up and piss off - makes it worse?
Please explain
Actually, there is an example on record in this thread:
... when it comes to "the point where their unsupported beliefs start having detrimental impacts on other people"↑, yeah, actually, I'm not looking forward to figuring out how to get through to her or her congregation, but perhaps you might explain just how it is you think asking her to submit to your judgment per mocking, fallacious, self-satisfying criteria, will do anything useful toward attending the harms she might bring to herself or others?
Yeah, it's probably still merely an opinion that treating people like that with such determined disrespect only entrenches many of them more deeply in their beliefs, but please do give us your opinion on how bullshitting them like the arrogant, relativist, amoral atheistic stereotype they prejudicially expect will magically (see what I did, there?) accomplish what useful outcome.
(#307↑)
Comparatively, it's pretty straightforward. The above was asked against a claim that one takes issue "at the point where their unsupported beliefs start having detrimental impacts on other people"; the pretense also claims to "care about the harms these beliefs do to the believers themselves". To the other, if you read closely, well, that's the thing about context: I've referred before to the principle of judging a statement according to what is not explicitly untrue, and some seemingly extraordinary circumstances are required before the observation that he never said anything about useful solutions stands out. Such as it is, his actual method is to denigrate and try to provoke religious people, to the point he even needs to invent a God and religious believer to publicly lecture self-righteously.
You, to the other, are much more straightforward. If his two bits read like an incapable, low-grade gaslight, you don't bother with anything so complicated. Your apparent complaint, "because those who proclaim they
know god frequently proclaim they
know the laws god wants us to obey", is what it is, but there remains a question of how that is related to your pretense of dysfunctional ignorance. A common reading would suggest you find that behavior among religious people problematic, but your retarded sealion routine only denigrates you and whatever cause you pretend. What do you think happens when the religious person over there sees you putting on such a determined effort to present yourself as stupid? What would anyone expect to accomplish by reinforcing the apparent opposition's presumption that the infidel challengers don't know what they're talking about?
Add your solution as how to make it better
Actually, there is an example on record in this thread:
To reiterate something I said … last year↗: I never have understood what so confuses ostensibly enlightened people about the idea that if you disarm the device then it cannot continue to do its damage.
Or, maybe I have.°° Disarming God, as I said, once upon a time, is a simple idea, but also becomes a fairly difficult social process. And rational discourse requires a certain amount of effort. It would be one thing to make the joke that we have discovered the problem, but, at the same time, there is also a viable question to what degree that such sloth is actually in effect.
(#132↑)
And I suppose that footnote can be viewed as a second example, of sorts, being a separate post that only reminds it isn't really a new pitch for me:
°° To wit, as I said, in 2003↗:
• People have some need to deal with this thing they call God. You might as well get used to it. Humans will never give it up entirely. In the meantime, disarm God. Take the sting out. Chop its balls off. Help people to not worry about God. They can make better choices from there. And who knows? Perhaps I underestimate the atheist potential. Perhaps, in not fearing God, people will be willing to let it go.
A couple months after↗ that, it came up again:
• Even to a general atheist who uses colloquial phrases like "God damn it," or "God only knows," or, "Oh my God," there is still a condition in the Universe that the word "God" represents. And that's all God ever has to be. It doesn't threaten you, it doesn't claim dominion, it doesn't tell you what's moral. It simply is ....
.... If you disarm "God", then "God" becomes a simple rhetorical convenience.
Lysander Spooner noted that the people cannot consent to award their government what the people do not have. Insofar as we acknowledge that gods are of human creation, the same principle applies.
Disarming God becomes a fairly useful venture right there, I'd say. It is people who give God the right to judge. It is people who arm God with the power of fear. It is people who decide what God loves and hates. Disarming God becomes a fairly difficult social process.
And the follow-up↗:
• Disarming God is a simple idea. My holy book, for instance, is Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree. Even at age four I had no need to believe that trees could talk like the one in the story. It was easy enough to get the point of the story without it. Now, if people choose to make some sort of formal code out of it, well ... it all depends on what that code works toward. Bearing in mind that people invent gods, and that people can only invest in gods what they themselves have to invest, changing the terms of what they invest is one of the highest priorities.
There's also a 2005↗ version that reminds humans invent gods, considers existential questions of mysterium—e.g., life, death, reality—and applies the idea of "God" as a tool humans use to consider the "all there is", and thereby disarm a paradox about countenancing the whole of infinity, i.e., the totality of what is, per a monotheistic framework.
(#133↑)
The objection is
extraordinary↗: "If God is everything and nothing, then God is not distinguishable as an entity in its own right."
Consider:
If one wins this basic argument transforming the pretense of God into something that does not actually do much of anything,
then it becomes indistinguishable as an entity in its own right.
And then:
If the problem is that "those who proclaim they know god frequently proclaim they know the laws god wants us to obey" and "won't shut up",
then how does
neutralizing the make-believe basis asserting to justify their problematic behavior become the
atheist's objection?
Seventeen years ago↗, I asserted, understanding the fiction by which so many justify so much violence presents the challenge of understanding the real and functional force of God in human affaris. I stand by this, and can even connect that old post—(the Pagels quote therein)—to
more recent↗ posts↗: A literary criticism built from what scraps the historical record provides, does function as an artistic critique reflecting the psychoanalytic meaning of history.
Maybe in
2010↗, when I said religion is, by certain perspectives, a collective performance art project?
From
2013↗: For a theist to abandon faith and become an atheist, this vacuum previously occupied by moral structure must be filled. In my experience, this proposition seems to confuse atheists. I even gave a basic example, and these years later would stand by it.
Add my solution? What, was I too subtle over the period?
