Those Christian Missionaries

[iceaura]

Religion requires a belief in a deity or deities. No god(s) = no religion

Now you insist on some private and ridiculous definition of "religion". Millions of people have followed the teachings of atheistic religions, complete with temples and priests and anthropological verification - despite the strange tendency of monotheistic anthropoligists to find "gods" wherever people seem to be reverent or ritualistic about something (some more intellectual US Navajos, for example, have come to declare to whites that Navajos don't have a native religion - because they realized that these things the anthros were calling "gods" were not at all what, say, Jesus or Allah or Zeus was, and they kept running into the fundie monotheist notion among whites that religion necessarily involved gods).

Atheists are not a group. Theists are not a group. Catholic Christians are a group - by their own claim.

 

[visceral_instinct]

There is certainly heated disgust at the rampant irrationality of religious claims – is that hatred?

Agreed. I don't hate anyone for being Christian, although I do hate when self-righteous people feel the need to force their religion up my ass. I do however feel, as you say, heated disgust at how religion is seen by many as something reasonable and normal. If I went around claiming that I believed in *thinks of random example* the 'Red Wolf God', would people 'respect my beliefs'? (ack, if I hear that phrase one more I'll puke). No, they'd laugh and say, 'Less of that LSD, girl!' and quite rightly so. Yet Christians, Muslims, Jews. etc. do the equivalent of that, yet it is treated as something normal and reasonable. Why? Because there are many of them.

 

[kaneda]

What has any religion done to earn the respect of non-believers? Nothing. Many have actively worked to earn the contempt and fear of non-believers while demanding their respect.