You don't have to pass an IQ test to be a senator

[toblix]

As for my personal way of going about my business: online and in writing I am pretty outspoken about religion and will frequently attack and mock it. As soon as a real, religious person is before me, however, basic human decency kicks in and overrides all of that and I become super accepting of whatever someone believes.

Don't you think "real, religious people" online deserve basic human decency?

[Roderick]

Debating with someone online is a lot different than talking to someone face to face. Regardless, the way I express it is more in monologues and blog posts. When I slag off religion, I hardly ever do it to a person's face, it's all spoken in generalities.

[Chris]

Simply dismissing all religious belief as "bearded man in sky" is really condescending and just as simple-minded as that dismissal's own conception of religious belief.

I'm not religious but I can entirely understand why people find religion and faith important in comprehending the extremely complex world in which we live. I DON'T mean simply in the sense of comprehending how the physical world got here at the expense of scientific understanding; I'm speaking about coming to terms with the magnitude of how humans live in this world, how we live with each other, how we govern ourselves morally, and how we comprehend our own interior lives and those of others.

"Religion" as a concept and religions themselves as traditions and faiths are many, many orders of magnitude more complex than the simple notion of a guy in the sky. Some people are no doubt drawn to that part of religion--the notion of a personal god. Some people are drawn to the more purely spiritual aspects. Some people are drawn to the sense of an ongoing tradition, or ritual, and are less invested in the spiritual aspects. Some people are drawn to a sense of moral order that is manifested externally; some internally.

I don't find organized religion a personally satisfying way to address the great questions of existence, but I don't have enough answers to feel justified in declaring somebody else's method or structure worthless. Even if I did have all the answers, I wouldn't presume their substance or the way in which I arrived at them would be equally satisfying to someone else.

I've had enough exposure in my life to incredibly thoughtful people with incredibly nuanced and well-interrogated religious beliefs to not write someone off simply because they subscribe to some form of religion.

Like many others here I'm sure, I find it very objectionable when religious belief comes in the form of institutionalized intolerance or legislation. There are plenty of other kinds of legislation I find objectionable that DON'T fundamentally spring from religion. Once you simply tar everyone of religious belief with the same brush, you're giving into the same kind of intolerance you profess to loathe, and you abdicate a considerable measure of empathy. A religious person can be homophobic or racist or whatever else; many, however, are not these things.

Religion is a major part of our world and our history as humans. You don't have to engage in it; I don't. But it is of crucial importance to many, many people. Let an individual demonstrate why he or she has views you find objectionable or sympathetic; don't ascribe such views right from the start.

Being tolerant is hard. Don't just demand it from other people, or just for people like you.

[Malice Song]

Obviously I cannot speak for all atheists, but from what I've seen I think the reason why a debate like this can erupt so easily is not necessarilly the notion that religion is something silly that has to be mocked, but rather something dangerous. At least personally I subscribe to that mindset.

Ideally, if someone has the courtesy not to bother me with his religious beliefs, I try to return the favor and not bother him with my opinion about how I think they're silly. Which I figure works out well enough and leaves two people simply subscribing to different mindsets in the understanding that they simply won't agree. That said, I've read the bible and as soon as I know someone else has and gets behind it, even just in part, alarm bells go off in my head.

I might be very wrong here or just blatantly misunderstand the whole concept of tolerance, but at least up until this point I think my obligation to try to practise tolerance is toward the individual, not the ideas, concepts and beliefs it subscribes to.

Being tolerant is hard. Don't just demand it from other people, or just for people like you.

In the end, though, basically this.

Which is probably why it's an interesting topic for me personally, since I think it is very easy to struggle with that part.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I didn't really mean to be condescending and rude, I genuinely just don't get how you can think that that's real, and in essence, that is what religious people believe. I can already see that we will have to agree to disagree because to me, religion is so obviously wrong that if I have to point it out to someone, the horse has already bolted.

You don't mean to be condescending and rude, and yet you can't help but be exactly that at the end of your post.

Edit: Chris put it rather succinctly.

The biggest problem with the self-righteous Athiests is that they often don't understand why anyone would need to believe in something like that. There are plenty of people who would simply not be around if it wasn't for their personal beliefs. To have someone come along and mock them out of a sense superiority digusts me, and yet I've seen it happen many times.

Life is hard enough as it is. If you need that belief to get you through it, then I completely respect you and your beliefs -- provided they don't affect other people negatively (e.g. you're attacking gay people), and you're not being manipulated (e.g. you have to pay a subscription to reach enlightenment), and that holds true for 99.999% of religion.

And to be clear: I'm not talking about giving the Church power over State. I'm talking about personal beliefs.

[racingfreak92]

His face at the end of the video was priceless!

[Salka]

I'm not religious but I can entirely understand why people find religion and faith important in comprehending the extremely complex world in which we live. I DON'T mean simply in the sense of comprehending how the physical world got here at the expense of scientific understanding; I'm speaking about coming to terms with the magnitude of how humans live in this world, how we live with each other, how we govern ourselves morally, and how we comprehend our own interior lives and those of others.

"Religion" as a concept and religions themselves as traditions and faiths are many, many orders of magnitude more complex than the simple notion of a guy in the sky. Some people are no doubt drawn to that part of religion--the notion of a personal god. Some people are drawn to the more purely spiritual aspects. Some people are drawn to the sense of an ongoing tradition, or ritual, and are less invested in the spiritual aspects. Some people are drawn to a sense of moral order that is manifested externally; some internally.

I don't find organized religion a personally satisfying way to address the great questions of existence, but I don't have enough answers to feel justified in declaring somebody else's method or structure worthless. Even if I did have all the answers, I wouldn't presume their substance or the way in which I arrived at them would be equally satisfying to someone else.

I've had enough exposure in my life to incredibly thoughtful people with incredibly nuanced and well-interrogated religious beliefs to not write someone off simply because they subscribe to some form of religion.

Do you find the people who generally have thought it out tend to sway towards a more vague concept of religion? That has always been my experience of this; people, for instance, who have have a belief based on the Catholicism in which they were raised, but also make up their own mind about certain issues, and will embrace science/biology/etc without blocking out areas that conflict with their religious beliefs. I don't look down on this mentality at all.

The thing that bothers me, and when I start to think condescendingly, is when people unquestioningly believe stories from the Bible, like Noah's Ark. Or, for instance, I knew a girl in school who was a great, kind girl, but she believed adamantly that gay people and non-believers would go to hell and burn for eternity, and that God spoke back to her when she prayed. We got on well anyway, but I can't help but find that sort of non-curious, non-questioning mentality to be a bad thing in any area of life, not just religion. Same with a guy I worked with who was deeply religious, he never pushed it on anyone else for the most part, but then he was very much about gay people and non-believers burning for eternity, and I do admittedly look down on people who believe this sort of thing based on the flimsiest and most questionable of reasons. I try to always keep an open mind about stuff and sometimes I have my eyes opened to things by people, or question things I previously thought I knew for certain. There is something both intensely annoying but simultaneously incredibly satisfying about someone winning you over in an argument and making you see things from a different point of view for the first time, but of the deeply religious people I know who take God and the Bible (for instance) as a very serious, inarguable fact, this never seems to happen for them. If it happened then they've already moved on to become the sort of religious person I don't look down on the mentality of, that I mentioned in the first paragraph.

I never wrote those people off due to their beliefs and we actually got on pretty well, I guess I'm trying to say that it's that mentality that I look down on, the idea that people can think 'Noah's Ark actually happened because it says so in the Bible and also you're going to hell forever because my Church says so' without questioning it. It's an odd, incurious mindset and I think people should be encouraged to constantly question and update their beliefs, no matter whether it's about science or religion or even music and art.

[Jaraknarn]

The difficulty that places on believers though is slightly more complex than just, 'well obviously that part of the bible is wrong/innacurate'.

If the book is divinely inspired, it MUST be accurate, even if we have the wrong understanding or interpretation of it. Because if its wrong, then God is wrong and then what's the point?

Your presenting people with a much bigger question than you imagine.

[Salka]

I don't think most people see it as a problem, most people just pick and choose from the bible. I went to a Catholic school and the girls there picked some things that were 'definitely true' and some things that seemed a bit much and so 'probably' weren't true depending on how much it all fit with their view of their world. But it didn't seem to be a particularly large problem to any of them, they were pretty chilled out about religion overall and just called total bullshit when they saw it, but were happy with a lot of the other, milder stuff in the aul' holy book.