Questions for your Religious friends.

[Brian37]

IMHO gained over the last year, AF is more lively and entertaining when religious members are active. When religious members contribute less, such as happened about a year ago, the threads get stale quicker. I debated with myself about whether to become active again since the discussions did not seem interesting any more. But I reminded myself that it is up to members, like me, to make positive contributions, which is what I am trying to do and remaining mindful that people are more than the sum of their beliefs. Disliking someone for their beliefs feels rather juvenile to me.

You can dislike the belief without disliking the person, but often the two are entangled.

Can you really 'like' a outwardly vocal white supremacist?

^^^^^^ So much this.


I have no contact with my biological family. Most of them are right wing fundies. But the reason I don't have contact with them, isn't that they believe, but more so in that the time we did interact, I constantly felt like they were sucking the life out of me. But especially my older brother, he was the worst. He took everything seriously, even outside of religion. We once went to a billiards bar, and I could not understand why he was so stone faced, and I got to the point where I asked him if there was anything wrong, and he literally shouted at me to the point the rest of the bar turned and looked at him when he shouted, "YOU DON'T THINK I AM GOING TO LET YOU BEAT ME".

And that was not a "friendly yell", it literally was an utterance of the bullshit tribalism he'd been indoctrinated with his entire life and my post adoption when we were kids. 

I can't claim that my brother was/is a white supremacist, but I can say he is a nutcase. 

Unlike my biological brother, my late mother was a bit of an authoritarian growing up, but not for religious reasons. She was a lifetime Catholic, even up until her death. My biological brother was some sect of evangelical, never figured out the exact sect. But between the two, while my adoptive mother was a hardnose, I never had the sense of "I will drowned you like Andrea Yates".  My biological brother always gave me the creeps.