(July 30, 2017 at 12:02 pm)Astonished Wrote:(July 30, 2017 at 5:35 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: When someone calls you "stupid", do you stop what you're doing and say, "You know, you might be right -- I'll get on that right away!"? No, you say "Fuck off" and move on.
If you're really concerned with "cluing someone in", calling them stupid doesn't strike me as a very smart way of going about your business. Of course, you're not really interested in that, because as you yourself said, "first off, fuck them". It does strike me as self-congratulatory masturbation: look at that fuckhead -- jeez, he's so stupid.
I've got Christians in my family who could clearly run circles around your dusty little brain. What they believe or don't believe doesn't speak to their intelligence. Perhaps you should look up the phenomenon of compartmentalization.
The stupid ones who are going to stereotype atheists one way or another (which I specifically referred to; 'delusional' is the term that more appropriately applies to theists, not 'stupid')? Yeah, they can be written off. Brains a tad dusty, and all that, apparently, not like I believe nor care how intelligent or not anyone you know might be. Being nice and cordial doesn't seem to faze that particular type of delusional thinker, so why bother when they just roll their eyes and say they'll pray for you or threaten you with hellfire? Their flavor of belief may not be rooted in stupidity (again, I've said this already) but once that delusion got hold of their dusty dendrites, the manifestation of stupid that otherwise wouldn't occur just happened to come out and play. It's not fair to them (indoctrination should carry stiff criminal penalties) but we're offering the way out of that and if they don't want to take the high road and be genuinely honest about what they're doing, well, we tried, and...fuck 'em. Can't say we weren't the ones trying to make a positive difference, and when that fails, middle finger. At least that'll more often keep them from preaching at us. At that point we're done with them, they may not be a hopeless case but someone or something else is going to have to take a crack at it, and the worst thing we could be doing is try to meet them half-way and make them think there's any validity to their claims. Once they've rejected any attempt at street epistemology or whatever preferred approach a non-believer might want to use, it's like an antibody is built up against that person and their ability to persuade. So fuck 'em is basically, we're done, as far as we're concerned we can write them off as hopeless cases because it's not in our particular hands anymore, but also shut down any attempt on their part to reciprocate. At least with our case, it wasn't an inane waste of breath with no intent to actually achieve something worthwhile.
You could have saved a lot of trouble be simply typing "Why yes, I AM a thoughtless douche."
At least this way you're doing the rational thing and giving supporting evidence ... there's that.
