(January 5, 2016 at 2:15 pm)excitedpenguin Wrote: I find it surprising that you met atheists who thought of Christians as subhuman. I, myself, think religion is a sort of mental illness, in the most outstretched sense of the word, and that people suffer from it to different degrees, most of them I think to a lesser degree, which is very good and we couldn't coexist in today's world otherwise. I'm talking about genuine belief here. I'm sure there are a lot of religious people who only identify as such but don't really experience anything spectacular because of it. But I wouldn't for one second classify religious people as second-class citizens or anything of the sort. As far as I'm concerned, they are my fellow human beings and I would much rather seek out the potential for rationality and correctly applied compassion in them then the more troubling parts that make the world a worse place than it needs to be. I hope you appreciate my comment, as you asked for our opinions.
Welcome and I hope you find here a community to your liking, where you can continue on this journey of self-discovery and truth-seeking.
I think the reason I thought atheists were this way is probably because I mainly ran into them under circumstances that pitted my worldview against theirs. Even now, I watch videos on Youtube and look at the comments beneath and find atheists abusing people who are just like I used to be. Sometimes I will comment that they should be spending their time trying to educate and have constructive dialog with people, because this would have been very beneficial to me at the time. Instead, I was mocked and derided, which only made me more staunch in my position. As a Christian, I tried to engage atheists in rational discussion. As an atheist, I try to engage theists in the same way. I think people are more reasonable than we give them credit for when engaged constructively, but just attacking them seems to trigger some tribal instinct that causes them to revert to "PROTECT" mode. In fairness, Christians are as bad, and there were times as a believer that I found myself siding with the atheist against nasty theists. I've awakened to the fact that there are good people and crapholes, and whether or not you're a person of "faith" seems to be irrelevant in that equation.
