Paul -
A lot of you are ex christians. So am I. The trouble with religion is that it has an effect on one's way of thinking / attitude, and it's very powerful, I'm sure you'd agree. So powerful in fact, that it continues sometimes even after the person has left the religion itself. For an ex christian atheist, that often comes in the form of perpetually raging against the very thing they were once apart of, and indirectly hating those who are still apart of it, or, sometimes, theists of any type. The desire to evangelise and convert turns into a desire to destroy anything that even remotely represents what they feel disgusted at having been a part of. Understandable, certainly. Effective? No. It's just an expression of an emotion. For me, what has remained is a belief in god, albeit in a very different context. And now I find myself in the middle. I know that there are christians and other religious people who would ridicule me just as much as a lot of theists do. In that sense, atheists and religious people are very similar. It's a masterpiece of irony.
In this mind -
I do accept and I am ok with the fact that some people don't believe in god, and I don't preach, witness, or proselytize and never have. Again, I don't know where you're getting all of this from.
A lot of you are ex christians. So am I. The trouble with religion is that it has an effect on one's way of thinking / attitude, and it's very powerful, I'm sure you'd agree. So powerful in fact, that it continues sometimes even after the person has left the religion itself. For an ex christian atheist, that often comes in the form of perpetually raging against the very thing they were once apart of, and indirectly hating those who are still apart of it, or, sometimes, theists of any type. The desire to evangelise and convert turns into a desire to destroy anything that even remotely represents what they feel disgusted at having been a part of. Understandable, certainly. Effective? No. It's just an expression of an emotion. For me, what has remained is a belief in god, albeit in a very different context. And now I find myself in the middle. I know that there are christians and other religious people who would ridicule me just as much as a lot of theists do. In that sense, atheists and religious people are very similar. It's a masterpiece of irony.
In this mind -
I do accept and I am ok with the fact that some people don't believe in god, and I don't preach, witness, or proselytize and never have. Again, I don't know where you're getting all of this from.
