(August 24, 2010 at 4:28 pm)RachelSkates Wrote: There truly is nothing like conversations with Xers to make you realize how far you have come with reason. I had to endure them today, and thought I would pass these on to the anti-brethren.No kidding. Around these forums, you can find a few stragglers here with the same mindset, though there are a few reasonable ones (looking at you fr0d0) but the conversations are sometimes just as inane.
I've been in a discussion with a poster called 'nogodaloud' around here somewhere over two threads now about how he thinks that certain sciences are just as faith-based as religion.
Luckily, though, my friends are actually quite like-minded in this regard or at least we don't really discuss it (I know a few of them are believers) and my family tend to not be very confrontational in this regard either.
Still though, this whole stigma that many christians have against mormons is so much the 'pot calling the kettle black' or however that goes that outsiders like you and I just see the inaneness of the whole thing for what it really is and I agree that it does show you just how irrational some people really are about their views on the world.
Still, on another point you agree on, their kind of willing ignorance can be extremely dangerous for everything from civil rights (concerning gays, people religions other than theirs, foreign people in general, their ideas on sex and STDs, etc) to education and their conversion of people into their special brand of insanity.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
