LISTEN, CHRISTIANS!

[Esquilax]

Some people here do appear to be very angry at God. Perhaps they are not really atheists because after all:

How would you know? That's what's at issue here; softening the statement might make it a little better, but the core contention is that you're making an assertion that- to my knowledge- you're simply unable to justify. That's not a weakness of yours- of course you can't read minds- but it does mean that asserting what someone's position is over and above their stated one is impossible for you.

To be clear, we get this a lot; theists will spin our anger at them, or at organized religion, or what have you, into an anger at their god. I can't tell you how many times that my frustration at a particularly dense or evasive religious answer has been reinterpreted by fiat into a secret agreement with that position, and an emotional bias against it. It happens, I suspect, for a number of reasons, but if you can't even get the basic attributions right in the position, no wonder you'll misinterpret it.

Hell, I've even seen you do this in the past, where I've bitched you out over something you'd said, and your response was that what I'd said was evidence that I was angry at god. I don't even know how you'd reach that conclusion, since my entire post had been entirely directed at you, but you stuck by it, and it's at that point that I kinda wash my hands of the whole mess, every time; it's pretty clear what I'm saying, and to whom I'm saying it, and there's no way to derive some secret additional band of data there, but you did anyway... lots of christians do.

What it tells me is that what I'm actually saying has little impact at all on the way you guys will receive it. If I can't even convince you that I'm saying the words that I'm saying, if you're just going to give yourself license to drop in a completely new sentence every time I speak, then there's little else that can be done. Can you blame us, for getting irritated to hear this assertion again? This is a forum, words are all we have, and this insistence that no, actually all those words mean different things that conveniently align with a position you don't have to respond to, robs us of even that.

Let me ask this of you instead: In the course of your travels IRL or on the web, have you never met anyone who was angry at God - and made all sorts of atheist arguments against Him?

Maybe. How would I know? Atheist arguments don't concern the idea that god exists and the interlocutor is angry at them. If they're using atheist arguments and I have no other way of knowing what they really think then I've got no means of legitimately gainsaying their word. That's the thing: neither of us are in a position to know, and so it's so weird to see you assert otherwise.