The problem is, Mehmet, I CANNOT go about my day without getting into religious friction. My house is sandwiched in between three churches that are all within a single block from me and they're all attended by all my neighbors who surround me with religious iconography over their houses, yards, and cars. I cannot leave my house without having to see no less than a half dozen crosses, and the city tells me they are all perfectly legal and allowed. I live my daily life in a country whose entire political process kowtows to christian ideologies first over all others. Shortly after my initial deconversion, I was subjected to a two-year barrage of creationist bullshit that saw me fail science class two years in a row because I refused to acknowledge it as a valid school of thought on the grounds that there is NOTHING scientific about it.
So in short: My reason for being loud? Because the cacophony of religion has been deafening me my entire life. I speak not only for the present, but the past as well; what right do the religious have to whine about me flatly saying their baseless, unreasonable, unscientific, irrational beliefs are just that [despite my 'volume' on the forums, I am not so loudly spoken in person, in truth] when they not only wield far more political power than my far more rational ideologies and therefore technically have far more power over me than I have over them, but also that their ancestors in belief and the loudest of their own numbers commit murders, rape, and torture in the name of their beliefs?? If I am example of the loudest among atheists and the most violent thing I do is yell at the evangelists to get the hell off of my doorstep and to stop coming around and waking me up in the morning, then what ground do they have to stand on to complain when their loudest bomb abortion clinics, kill doctors, blow themselves up in marketplaces and kill hundreds, torture women for the crime of being raped and so on and so forth?
You respect peoples' choices? So if I chose to gut someone like a fish and danced around and chose to tell everyone how much I enjoyed it, would you respect that choice? It's an extreme analogy, mind you, but do you mean you respect peoples' right to decide for themselves? That makes far more sense, if that's the case.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped caring about the differentiation between the quietly devout and the loudly devout. I started grouping them all together.
Looking back on my OP...I can see I was certainly speaking with a lot of rage. When I wrote it I'd just dealt with knowledge that because of the state governor pushing through a bill that was largely sponsored by conservative "family value"-centric christian organizations my room-mates and I are being kicked out of a home we've all become very comfortable in. It was sort of the final straw.
Still...clearly these are feelings that have been gnawing at me gradually over the years, and being quiet and civil and polite has only let them fester. I still maintain, however, that when someone starts screaming at you, you can be quiet for a while but eventually you're probably going to have to scream back, and louder.
I'll have to give this some more thought. I now realize I spoke in haste.
So in short: My reason for being loud? Because the cacophony of religion has been deafening me my entire life. I speak not only for the present, but the past as well; what right do the religious have to whine about me flatly saying their baseless, unreasonable, unscientific, irrational beliefs are just that [despite my 'volume' on the forums, I am not so loudly spoken in person, in truth] when they not only wield far more political power than my far more rational ideologies and therefore technically have far more power over me than I have over them, but also that their ancestors in belief and the loudest of their own numbers commit murders, rape, and torture in the name of their beliefs?? If I am example of the loudest among atheists and the most violent thing I do is yell at the evangelists to get the hell off of my doorstep and to stop coming around and waking me up in the morning, then what ground do they have to stand on to complain when their loudest bomb abortion clinics, kill doctors, blow themselves up in marketplaces and kill hundreds, torture women for the crime of being raped and so on and so forth?
You respect peoples' choices? So if I chose to gut someone like a fish and danced around and chose to tell everyone how much I enjoyed it, would you respect that choice? It's an extreme analogy, mind you, but do you mean you respect peoples' right to decide for themselves? That makes far more sense, if that's the case.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped caring about the differentiation between the quietly devout and the loudly devout. I started grouping them all together.
Looking back on my OP...I can see I was certainly speaking with a lot of rage. When I wrote it I'd just dealt with knowledge that because of the state governor pushing through a bill that was largely sponsored by conservative "family value"-centric christian organizations my room-mates and I are being kicked out of a home we've all become very comfortable in. It was sort of the final straw.
Still...clearly these are feelings that have been gnawing at me gradually over the years, and being quiet and civil and polite has only let them fester. I still maintain, however, that when someone starts screaming at you, you can be quiet for a while but eventually you're probably going to have to scream back, and louder.
I'll have to give this some more thought. I now realize I spoke in haste.
