RE: Do you argue with religious people?
April 25, 2015 at 3:37 am
(This post was last modified: April 25, 2015 at 3:43 am by Razzle.)
The only religious people I interact with offline right now are two of my neighbours, a husband and wife. They also happen to be the only fundamentalists of any religion that I've ever met, as far as I know.
(Yeah, the 70% Christian figure for the UK from the last census is bullcrap - most of the people I've ever met believe in a vague kind of higher power at most, and probably answer 'Christian' in polls just as their cultural background affiliation, even though most of us are closer to being cultural pagans than cultural Christians, given the holidays we celebrate and how we celebrate them. Also, most of the people we have who really do believe at least the basic Christian doctrine that Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected, in my experience are first, second or third generation immigrants, hence London has a higher proportion than most of the country. It doesn't seem able to survive longer than that very often in this environment. This is where religion comes to die.)
The husband does bring it up sometimes, and they occasionally invite us to church events. I enjoy the opportunity to discuss his beliefs. We get on well, have significant personality traits and interests in common, and he's not obnoxious or judgemental about out our non-belief - he was only converted in adulthood, by a ouija board experience, and in this nonreligious society he hasn't got the ignorance and misconceptions about nonreligious people in general and atheistic nonreligious people in particular that I see online from theists in highly religious societies.
I feel sorry for them. Fundamentalist Christianity must be a horrible thing to believe in, and thinking that Yahweh reads minds, they must have to deny even to themselves how horrible they find it and how they wish it weren't true. That's why you get that evasive "it's not up to me to say you deserve hell, I just have to trust God to know best". They can't admit how they feel about it.
(Yeah, the 70% Christian figure for the UK from the last census is bullcrap - most of the people I've ever met believe in a vague kind of higher power at most, and probably answer 'Christian' in polls just as their cultural background affiliation, even though most of us are closer to being cultural pagans than cultural Christians, given the holidays we celebrate and how we celebrate them. Also, most of the people we have who really do believe at least the basic Christian doctrine that Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected, in my experience are first, second or third generation immigrants, hence London has a higher proportion than most of the country. It doesn't seem able to survive longer than that very often in this environment. This is where religion comes to die.)
The husband does bring it up sometimes, and they occasionally invite us to church events. I enjoy the opportunity to discuss his beliefs. We get on well, have significant personality traits and interests in common, and he's not obnoxious or judgemental about out our non-belief - he was only converted in adulthood, by a ouija board experience, and in this nonreligious society he hasn't got the ignorance and misconceptions about nonreligious people in general and atheistic nonreligious people in particular that I see online from theists in highly religious societies.
I feel sorry for them. Fundamentalist Christianity must be a horrible thing to believe in, and thinking that Yahweh reads minds, they must have to deny even to themselves how horrible they find it and how they wish it weren't true. That's why you get that evasive "it's not up to me to say you deserve hell, I just have to trust God to know best". They can't admit how they feel about it.
