I Would Like To Talk to Atheists Who Aren't Assholes. Do Any of You Exist?

[liam]

I'd like to preface this by saying that I'm not going to be close-minded, just veracious.

Most Catholics are nice people.

That is an experiential generalisation and that can't be held to be true. I've lived around a great number of catholics and found them to be mostly dogmatic, so perhaps our experience differs but in your account vs mine we have an approximately 50/50 chance of them being nice or dogmatic close-minded individuals.

You go to a Catholic forum and everyone acts really nice.

When you are also a catholic forum, you go into any group as one of the group and they tend to be nice to you. There is a lot of difference between this and saying that catholics are nice to atheists, calvinists, orphics, Arians, etc etc.

You go to a Catholic school, and there may be a few jerks, but most people are nice.

Yeah this isn't true. I went to a catholic school, it was horrendous, there are a few jerks everywhere but when they force their religion on you as am 8 year old when you explicitly tell them you don't want to pray and they give you detention and corporal punishment (yes, it did happen), there is more than some jerkish behaviour happening.

I have not observed this about Protestants or atheists.

This is most likely because you judge niceness according to people's willingness to tolerate your ideas without objective consideration, the protestants wont accept you because you had a trend of killing them for thousands of years, as well as we atheists. You may have overlooked some details here, but I accept that there are some bad people in every group and I'm sorry you encountered it from us, yet this is no reason to generalise.

In my experience, Protestants are not nice at all. Some of them are downright nasty.

so sayeth the catholic, you're diametrically opposed, what do you expect? There is such bias in this judgement. I get the impression that all christians are downright nasty, as you assume that of protestants and we atheists.

And atheists tend to be very rude, and not nearly as smart as they think they are.

Generalisation, no proof, generally biased. Seems an ironically asshole-ish thing to say.

So one thing that makes me think that Catholicism is worthwhile is that believing in it makes people act nicer to other people.

I can't help but be a bit of an asshole here:

-Murder of barbarians, orphics and so on in the ascendance to state religion of Rome
-Countless sectarian murders by catholics
-countless murders of other catholics by catholics
-The massacres of arians
-the closing of the athenian schools by justinian
-the conquest of christianity across all of europe and asia, killing thousands and forcing the local populace into submission
-crusades to jerusalem, multiple times, killing because of religious differences
-violent supression of the reformation
-complete supression of all difference of opinion for 1500 years
-the dark ages (yep, your fault)
-the conquest of america, church-sanctioned, the greatest genocide possibly ever
-constant atheist murder since ano domini
-modern supression of science and scientists
-present day: bigoted, backward-thinking, homophobic, sexist, racist, power-crazy organisation which negatively influences the church and openly condemns the prosecution of child rape.

I'm sorry, but supporting a monster makes you less than nice people. You may be a nice person but don't you fucking dare assume I ought to respect your religion.

So why would I want to be an atheist and hang out with rude, unhappy people?

There is no 'wanting' to be an atheist, you either realise there is no God or you don't, it is not a choice. Just like the homosexuals, but I suppose that analogy will just make you think I'm a satanist sodomite?

It doesn't make sense to me.

Then put in the effort to act like a rational human being and stop being a fucking asshole. Hypocrite.