Since I'm brand new to the forums, thought I'd weigh in.
Hi Gandalf, welcome to Sciforums.
My preference is to spend time with intelligent people, regardless of their faith or lack thereof. If they will respect my faith, I'll more than happily respect theirs.
I find that I form my deepest friendships with intelligent people. It's our conversations that kind of cement the relationship. Some difference of opinion isn't necessarily a bad thing either, we have to have something to say to one another that's more engaging than 'I agree'.
I'm a pastor, and actually, I'd RATHER spend time with an intelligent atheist any day than a narrow-minded parishioner, no matter how devout they might be.
I'm a religious agnostic with Theravadan Buddhist tendencies. But I don't have any requirement that my friends all believe just as I do. (How could I? My own views and practices are fluid, a continual work in progress.)
I think that the requirement for compatibility is more like open-mindedness, the willingness to accept that multiple paths and approaches exist in philosophy and religion. While we may have chosen one of them as our own and may indeed be very committed to it, and perhaps might even be devoting our lives to it, there's always going to be a chance (however small it is) that we are wrong and the other person is right.
So I'm willing to listen to just about anyone, provided that they are willing to talk to me interactively in a friendly manner and not just preach at me one-way. If the person's ideas seem kind of dumb and not of very much interest, I'll very gently try to move the conversation away from religion towrds some secular common interest. If the person's religious ideas are interesting and thought provoking, then I'll pursue the religion conversation with great pleasure. It might seem paradoxical, but sometimes friendships can arise out of differences.
I guess that the way I see it, when it comes to the transcendent (if there is such a thing) we are all of us seekers. That's our human condition. We are all peering into the impenetrable fog of the unknown with our feeble little flashlights, trying to get some small sense of things.
I love discussing evolution (natural selection for me, with God in the background tweaking the genetic code every now and again), cosmology (Big Bang unless evidence begins to move away from this), political theory, and other cool topics. That isn't always easy for me among the very religious (in some circles, at least).
It sounds like you might be a good addition here at Sciforums.
Many religious people seem incapable of interacting on any equal footing with an atheist or other non-believer. When some do interact, it's not authentic, because the religious person wants to convert the atheist from their "wrong" way of thinking.
I've met a few 'evangelicals' like that. They came on syrupy sweet, affecting a cloying sort of feigned "love" despite the fact that I was virtually a complete stranger. (A 'lost soul', I guess.) When it became clear that I'd studied religion in university and already had a non-Christian path of my own, all the "love" suddenly turned to stony hardness and they began trying to keep their children away from me.
It didn't bother me very much, since I don't think that I could have become good friends with somebody like that anyway. Keeping our distance was probably the best thing for both of us.
That's been very unusual though. I can count the times that it's happened in my life on one hand. Most evangelicals and fundamentalists that I meet aren't fake-love trap-door spiders. They are people that I can get along with perfectly fine provided that we both agree not to talk to the other about religion. I have quite a few acquaintances like that. I may not become the closest of friends with them though, since they aren't the kind of person I can fully confide in.
The good news is that there are as many types of Christians and other spiritual seekers as there are any other group, and some I've found are really open and welcoming of people from any background or viewpoint.
Yes, definitely. I have to say that some of the most spiritual and humane people that I've met in my lifetime have been Christians. Christianity does seem to work as a spiritual path for some people at least. (Perhaps every religion works as a path for some people.) Some of the most intelligent have been Christians too. (My thesis advisor in graduate school was a former Catholic priest with a doctorate in sacred theology from Georgetown no less.) I have some fondness for the Christian contemplative traditions.
You will probably discover, if you haven't already, that many atheists are as prone to characturizing Christians as Christians are to stereotyping atheists. Atheists often believe, and some will argue very loudly and strenuously, that the only "true" Christian is a Protestant fundamentalist, a believer in full Biblical literalism and inerrancy. (You haven't lived until a discussion board full of atheists has lectured you on what "true" Christianity is and must be.) It seems that there are atheist fundamentalists, just as there are religious fundamentalists.
