(September 29, 2014 at 4:34 pm)Jenny A Wrote: This is complicated. I respect many, many Christians, many Jews, and a few Muslims and a few Buddhists not to mention at least one Hindu as human beings. The percentages roughly mirror the numbers of such people I know. There are also few atheists I do not respect. That part is mostly simple.
The problem is respecting their religious beliefs. When those beliefs are represented to me as "The Bible (or the Koran, or the Pope) said so and I believe it," I find I cannot respect that position. Nor can I respect religious beliefs decked out as scientific ones, or the refusal to consider the historical evidence when looking at religious texts and traditions. Some beliefs I simply cannot take overly seriously.
It isn't necessarily a problem I have with religion. There are a whole raft of conspiracy theories I can't take seriously either. It's not the conclusions, it's the sloppy/dishonest thinking that gets me.
While I can respect people's faith based on their own personal experience/feeling of inner truth, I cannot take them seriously if they persist in thinking that such experiences should convince anyone else.
Finally I have no respect for the views of religious persons who insist that everyone believes in god and that atheists are merely in denial.
This clears a lot up for me, and I agree, religious persons who - A) don't respect themselves B) Live out their "faith" in a means that is dishonest to themselves or others and/or selfishly practiced C) force their religious experiences as being dogma for everyone else - make respecting their beliefs, difficult and nearly impossible.
I have run into quite a few religious people like that, as well as non-religious people. However I would urge that because of the nature of these difficult to respect individuals being across the board non-religiously and religiously (from what I'm understanding from a lot of the posts), that it depends on the individual and not necessarily always the belief that individual holds. In other words, dicks can be dicks whether they're Christian, Atheist, Hindu, or whatever.
In the case of "respecting beliefs" (and I'm definitely speaking to myself here as well) it would be best phrase it as "respecting others, and exclude their beliefs" in order to seperate the individual from the stereotype of the worldview
