Well..
Today I indulged in one of my less fortunate hobbies and went over to www.carm.org to chat with the Christians. As usual, we didn’t agree. What’s unusual is that they banned me. And I wasn’t personally insulting anyone, or anything. Oh, I did talk about how God and Satan might be the same entity, but I don’t really think *that* was worthy of banning.
One bit about my final defense struck me as apt, so I’m going to quote it here. Later I may regret it, but right now it feels true.
Sheer: I want you all to remember
Sheer: This is what happened to Jesus
Sheer: people didn’t like his ideas, so they killed him
Javy: Loan…sheer embraces contradictions and says they’re not contradictions y
et used the same logic he tries to defy to arrive at his explanation that they a
re not contradictions
Javy: No need to listen to him.
Sheer: Javy doesn’t like my ideas so he’s about to ban me
Javy: He’s just silly.
Sheer: Not as bad as killing, but still pretty much a ‘shut the *** up’.
He did, of course, ban me almost immediately.
I had to fight with the urge to knock the chat room off the net. I certainly could have – with a couple of well placed commands, even – but it wouldn’t be right for me to do so. It’s their place, they can kick me out if they want. It just doesn’t seem like a very enlightened attitude to have.
And perhaps my problem is that while I’m violently disagreeing with the tenants of Christianity, I’m looking for enlightened behavior from Christians. I’m not saying the two are mutually exclusive – after all, I’ve known some pretty enlightened Christians – but just that they aren’t particularly aligned either. There seem to be so many people who can’t imagine what it would be like to be on the other end. Maybe at times I’m guilty of that particular sin myself, but at least I’m aware of it.
I do, honestly, feel like it was their loss.
February 20th, 2007 at 7:43 am
Why do you converse on this subject with people who you know going into it won’t agree with you, and aren’t going to be enlightened enough to listen to you, and try to see your viewpoint even if it disagrees with yours?
I’ve talked to a fair amount of people who think my beliefs are just terrible. And you know what? I’m not going to let them discourage me from believing, or bully or guilt me into changing my mind. Nor am I going to talk to them if they aren’t going to give me the respect that I give them.
February 20th, 2007 at 7:46 am
er, I meant “try to see your viewpoint even if it disagrees with theirs”
February 20th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
I don’t really know why I do it. I know that it’s a sign of some sort of mental issue. I’ve been going fairly regularly to see various people to try and find a solution to this, and so far we haven’t come up with anything, but I still hold out hope.
I think part of it is my childish way of trying to get back at them for all the time that I was forced to go to church, and all the mental agony I suffered while trying to accept their religion despite all the broken / fundamentally unbeleivable things about it.
I think what I’m doing at plur.us is probably a much healthier outlet for these feelings.. it’s kind of a ‘here’s what *I* think is true’. I can’t write the whole bible, but I can at least give a stab at what I think should have been the opening chapters.
February 20th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Ah ok, I understand your reasoning. That’s fine, if you’re just blowing off some steam. I mean, it’s not for me to say, ya know? I just wondered if you’re expecting rational conversation why you’d go some place you know you won’t get it. 🙂 I have my own versions of such things I’m sure.
I guess I want you to know that they are people around who would listen, and not get reactive, but that depends on your mission really.
I can’t blame you for wanting to “get back” at being forced to do something you didn’t want to do or didn’t believe in. And as long as it doesn’t really bother you to get banned, it’s all good.
February 21st, 2007 at 12:28 am
Something cool that Bubba showed me, and I thought you should not be without if you’re going to pursue this:
The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible / Quran / Book of Mormon
-D.
March 10th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Faith is belief without evidence. Faith is the cornerstone of most religions. To me, faith is the rejection of reason. Once someone decides to believe in God/Jesus/Allah/Moses/etc, they have rejected one of the greatest features of human kind, the ability to reason. If there is a god, and this god created within humans the ability to make reasonable choices based on the evidence before them – then I would expect this god to be happy not to be believed in without evidence that cannot be questioned. Of all the gods that have been documented, I find the Flying Spaghetti Monster to be the most likely one to be real ( http://www.venganza.org/ ). There is a chart that demonstrates correlation between a decrease in pirates and an increase in global warming… so there must be a Flying Spaghetti Monster!!
By the way, your assigned reading for today is “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins
http://www.allbookstores.com/book/0618680004