[Serious] Over the top

[Belacqua]

"People are generally uninterested in holding other atheists to any kind of standard of truth or reasonableness."
--Belaqua

And by 'people' you mean atheists. 

Yes, I meant to say "atheists on atheist forums" or something like that. Sorry if I was unclear. 

Who are so very unlike theists in this regard. 

Right, I also feel that it would be good if smart Christians did more to hold stupid Christians accountable for their stupid beliefs. Some do, of course, but many don't.

I just don't want to say that because other people fail to do something, it's OK for us to fail to do it also. If working toward the truth is a good thing, we should all do it. 

The USA RL demographics are the reverse of this forum.

I appreciate that atheists are still the minority in many places, and that this can cause real discrimination and trouble. I wouldn't want to work in a place where everyone else was proselytizing all the time. So I'm sorry if I give the impression that I have no sympathy for things that happen off this forum. 

My point on this thread is very limited: we should try to be accurate and fair. We have a duty to do that, even if we are in the minority, even if we get scolded for it.

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If the statement were tweaked to say "to be able to inform ALL that a person is", they yes, I would be inclined to agree.
In my view, empty vessels are indeed lacking in wisdom and/or morality. If one relies solely on religion to inform their every move and judgment, I would say that it's fair to assume there probably wasn't much to them to start with. 

Well, let's take the case of Martin Buber. Jewish mystic, existentialist philosopher, and theologian. 1878 – 1965. Author, most famously, of I and Thou. 

I and Thou is a beautiful meditation on how we relate to the world. It ponders the possibility of -- I don't even know the word -- whatever the opposite of bigotry is. It has been admired by Christians and atheists as well. 

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that every sentence Buber ever wrote was informed by his Jewish identity. This is the way he sees the world, the way he contemplates morality and all human goals. It is deeply felt and sincere. So to say that this way of being in the world limits him to be an empty vessel, to always being "little" and never having any possibility of being more than he was at the beginning, is demonstrably untrue. 

Now, it's certainly true that he knew about more than the Jewish way of things. His mysticism bears strong resemblances to Jacob Boehme, William Blake, Kierkegaard, and other less famous people. These were not Jews. As an existentialist he knew of, and may well be inspired by or reacting to non-Jewish philosophers. No thinking person lives entirely in a bubble. 
Yet his Jewishness informs what he is. 

So yes, we could add qualifiers to the sentence to make it more accurate. 

I could be wrong, but I'm detecting a whiff of selective outrage.

Well, this thread is about selective outrage: the outrage we show, the "pouncing on" we do, the high standards we hold, for people unlike ourselves. Little of which seems to apply to people of our own tribe.