Enmos
Valued Senior Member
I wonder what it is that they think they are attacking.. :shrug:
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Why do Americans still dislike atheists?
- Thread starter Fraggle Rocker
- Start date
I wonder what it is that they think they are attacking.. :shrug:
Observations stemming from this and other forums, makes me think the question for this topic is an atheist projection, since it is the atheists displaying the most dislike. The religious try to help, while the atheists spit venum.
If you go to a church service, atheism is not a fixation nor is it a central rally point for religion. With atheism, an anti-religion sentiment is a fixation and the central rally point. Atheism gets much of its recruitment mileage from this. Religion does not get anywhere near that mileage. People do not seek God tbecause they are promised this is a way to excape the atheists. It is more of a spiritual attraction than an atheist repulsion. But atheism recruitment banks on inducing religion repulsion to gain members since what else can they offer that is new?
The dislike starts at the atheist side, sort of like a bully calling the other child names. If the child reacts to the name calling and does not just take the verbal beating, the bully feels he is the victim in all this. Thus the projected question of being persecuted.
A loose analogy might be the poor resentful of the rich due to liberal programming. The rich do not dwell on the poor in the same proportion as thepoor are taught to dwell on the rich. They are too busy making money. The poor, on the other hand, will continue to see the rich as a central threat, even though the rich are not focused on them like that.
If you go to a church service, atheism is not a fixation nor is it a central rally point for religion. With atheism, an anti-religion sentiment is a fixation and the central rally point. Atheism gets much of its recruitment mileage from this. Religion does not get anywhere near that mileage. People do not seek God tbecause they are promised this is a way to excape the atheists. It is more of a spiritual attraction than an atheist repulsion. But atheism recruitment banks on inducing religion repulsion to gain members since what else can they offer that is new?
The dislike starts at the atheist side, sort of like a bully calling the other child names. If the child reacts to the name calling and does not just take the verbal beating, the bully feels he is the victim in all this. Thus the projected question of being persecuted.
A loose analogy might be the poor resentful of the rich due to liberal programming. The rich do not dwell on the poor in the same proportion as thepoor are taught to dwell on the rich. They are too busy making money. The poor, on the other hand, will continue to see the rich as a central threat, even though the rich are not focused on them like that.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
What??? What planet do you live on? Certainly not this one! The fucking Christians have been hostile and intolerant of non-Christians since they seized control of the Roman Empire seventeen hundred years ago! Under Emperor Constantine they began the persecution of the Jews, which was virtually the defining trait of European Christendom right up until the 1940s, during my own lifetime, when they thought they finally had enough power to simply exterminate them.
And the Jews believe in the same god as the Christians and even believe in about two-thirds of the same Bible. People who did not come from that Abrahamic tradition were treated even worse. "Heathens," which is their word for the rest of the human race, including people who don't believe in their god as well as people who don't believe in any god at all, were regarded as nothing more than dog shit on God's lawn. Practitioners of the traditional polytheistic Egyptian religion were made second-class citizens in their own country. The Aztecs, stewards of a civilization more than a thousand years old, complete with Bronze Age technology and a written language, were made slaves and their libraries were burned down because they were full of "heathen" teachings. The Incas, stewards of an even younger civilization, were treated the same way, and their art objects, the treasures of their culture, were melted down and shipped to Europe as bullion because they depicted "heathen" images.
So don't give me your lying bullshit about how "helpful" Christians are to others. Their only definition of the word "help" is to turn us into ignorant, superstitious fools like themselves, with or without our consent and cooperation. Christians have always been evil pigs to outsiders, and most of the time they have even made war upon each other over minute differences in their interpretation of the Bible. They started the cycle of hatred and what goes around comes around.
The only reason they're pretending to "help" us now is that they see their majority status slipping away as humanity evolves away from its Stone Age fairytales, and they need to get the rest of us to like them so we don't start treating them the way they've been treating us for nearly two thousand miserable years.
Like most Christians you affect a naive ignorance about the history of your own community. You guys started it. Now you're finding out what it's like to be on the other side.
Excuse me, I have to go meet with my Jewish, Egyptian, Aztec, Inca, Cherokee, African, Australian and Hawaiian buddies. We're putting the finishing touches on the plans for the New Crusades, the New Inquisition and the New Holocaust. We'll be knocking on your door in a few years. Paybacks are hell.
No, they seek gods, primarily because they are promised a way to escape death.
Or maybe we're just tired of being told that we are evil and going to burn in hell. :bugeye:
What a bunch of krap. I don't feel victimized at all, but I'm damn tired of theists spouting lies and claiming they are right without any shred of evidence to support their fantasy beliefs.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
But is that the reason you dislike them, or merely a reason to not respect them?
Lots of people are fools, but I don't usually hate them. I often feel sorry for them, although some of them make so much money that I envy them instead.
I suggest that the reason we dislike Christians, specifically, is their evangelism. I, in fact, don't have a problem with the ones who aren't always in my face trying to convert me. I can say without a trace of irony that some of my best friends really are Christians.
I don't go around bad-mouthing them categorically in daily life, the way I do on this one website which is supposed to be an oasis of science and reason, so supernaturalism has no place here.
I also don't hold members of other religions in the same regard, for the same reason. Jews absolutely do not evangelize, and in fact they don't make it easy to convert to their religion even if you sincerely want to. In their own mythology this is the reason that God continues to punish them: they promised they would spread his religion to the entire human race, in gratitude for his letting them out of bondage in Egypt. They didn't hold up their end of the bargain. In any case Judaism is a religion of laws rather than doctrine, and I haven't met very many who place much importance on literal belief in the Torah.
Hindus don't seem to evangelize at all, and in my experience if you really corner one he'll readily admit that Hinduism is nothing but a collection of really useful metaphors. There are probably many more devout, literal believers in the old country.
I guess Rastafarians evangelize, but it's hard to get mad at somebody who offers you a spliff with the lecture.
The people I've met who considered themselves Muslims were very secular and almost never talked about it, so I can't say much about that community. But in the abstract, evangelism seems to be as important a doctrine to them as it is to the Christians.
A bit silly considering Atheists are doing the same exact thing. The way i look at it is how can i be an Atheist when i dont know? The whole Atheist thing is and always was a mistake on the part of those not believing in any of the set belief systems. All they did was set up a system of absolutes, on one side you have this and on the other side you have that. Somewhat comical if you ask me.
You are completely wrong.
The one that makes the positive claim is responsible for providing evidence. The default situation is nothing exists without proof.
Which is of course completely wrong.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
You don't know what? (Besides how to punctuate a sentence?) You know that there is no respectable evidence for the existence of supernatural phenomena. You know that religion exists only because it has been passed down by word of mouth since the Stone Age, when people could be more easily forgiven for not understanding how nature works. You know that the leaders of all the major world religions have been steadily conceding more and more of their beliefs to be merely metaphors rather than historical facts. You know that with every passing century more and more of the fundamental underpinnings of Abrahamic mythology have been proven false, from the six-day creation to the exile in Egypt.
So what exactly is it that you feel that you "don't know"?
Huh? What is the "system of absolutes" that atheists "believe" in? My whole family are atheists and I was never told of any system of absolutes. I was simply sent to school at age six and told to learn how to learn, and to not believe something simply because somebody tells me to.
You're right about that. Otherwise science would grind to a halt as we dissipated our energy and other resources in disproving every crackpot hypothesis that is offered without evidence. We can prove a positive statement "true beyond a reasonable doubt" (since there are no absolute truths in science, only mathematics), or we can prove it to be absolutely false. But no one is ever required to prove a negative assertion.
But you didn't get that one quite right. The correct statement is that no hypothesis can be proven true without evidence, and that without evidence not only has it not been proven true, but it has not even earned the right to be treated with respect.
Once evidence is provided we are then obliged to treat it with respect (commensurate with the quality of the evidence), but it still has to be tested and proven true beyond a reasonable doubt, or proven absolutely false.
I know how to punctuate sentences.
There is plenty of evidence for supernatural phenomena, the problem is that once an explanation is found it is no longer considered Supernatural. It would be wise for you to learn this distinction.
We are talking about two different things here. Organised religion and the fact that Atheists make a claim with no proof is very different.
We are talking about two different things here. Organised religion and the fact that Atheists make a claim with no proof is very different.
I laugh in your direction.
That is fine. At least now you know something can exist without proving its existence to you. Because that is not a requirement.
Don't bother trying to tell me what I know, because you are the one without a clue.
If you want to continue this offshoot of the discussion please provide proof that supernatural beings (e.g. gods) exist. Otherwise they don't.
Well i dont know how to break this to you but did it ever occur to you that the vast\overwhelming majority (say around 90% or higher) of theists dont give a fuck what your belief is?