njlauren
Posts: 1577
Joined: 10/1/2011 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kdsub Then you have not been reading these message boards. Atheists are constantly attacking beliefs with science...and there is nothing wrong with that... But all you must do to the evangelists is say no thank... you can close the door or walk away. If you do how often do you here them hurling insults at you? Here on the boards those of faith are told we are ignorant...availing ourselves of fairy tales and Ouija boards...the cause of all evil in the world...on and on all because we defend our beliefs or dare to question the so called facts of science. There is no doubt there are problems with religion...and its view towards atheists and vice versa but I believe HERE on these boards there is more disrespect towards people of religion then toward atheists. And I only point this out because on another thread a point was being made that it is the other way around. I could just be my perception is biased because of my faith so I'll shut up about it and let the comments prove me right or wrong. Butch I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of this board, you aren't going to get a lot of people of faith on a board like this, because to be honest, even mainstream religious faiths treat sex as something inherently evil unless you are popping out babies, I belonged to a very liberal church and during gay pride month, they had posters up about gay culture, various aspects of it, and so forth, and the only complaints were because they had a section on one poster explaining about the leather community..it was not graphic, showed the leather pride flag and talked a little bit about what it meant in a pretty g rated way..and people were incensed, the feminist dyke types called it patriarchal abuse (even though, mind you, we were talking about gay culture), others called it promoting perversion, it was sad. To be honest, I think those outwardly derided religion have only seen the image portrayed out in society, and for the past 30 or 40 years, mostly thanks to the GOP, it has been the mindless, hater, evangelical/fundamentalist kind, the battles over teaching evolution, evangelicals wholeheartedly supporting the climate change debate on the negative side (I am talking as a religious belief, not arguing the science, but as a duty to God to do it, which is fucking weird, and purely political), or the non stop argument that their belief should reflect how gays are treated by society,and so forth....and in general society, people like Dawkins and Hitchens are overwhelmed by the wall of "Belief" that is thrown around, and usually in a negative way, if it isn't the evangelicals, it is the RC church leaders......I think they are reacting because that is the image that has come to mean Christian, which is sad, because the evangelicals I am talking about represent the worst, not the best., as the Bishops represent the worst of the church, not the best. In a sense, I blame people of faith for this, because they let it happen, and liberal churches are as much to blame as anyone. They let the religious right and the Catholic Bishops become Christianity and its face; how many people of faith, of the type we are talking about, protested the GOP's rightward social agenda by refusing to vote for GOP candidates and letting them know why? Churches will put up protests about the war, about abortion, how about protesting the GOP becoming the 'party of CHristianity' without really becoming that (like, while doing that, cutting programs for the poor and powerless to give the rich tax breaks? Not WWJD, for sure). Unfortunately, the image of believers has become that of a bunch of uneducated yahoos, like the clown running for senate claiming that a woman who had been raped couldn't get pregnant (with the idea that if a woman got pregnant while claiming to be raped, it wasn't raped, she 'wanted it'...*gag*) and no one wants to challenge them on it. Some do, of course, Jack Spong probably put as good a case against fundamentalism as I can ever want to see, but his type is few and far between.
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