LISTEN, CHRISTIANS!

[Esquilax]

Do I KNOW with 100% certitude? Heck no. But I read what they write, and they sound pretty pissed off to me - not just the tone or the language...there is some real deep hate in some folks, I think, and it comes across in their posts. That's not normal, is it? Cause I don't hate anybody or anything.

I think you're mistaking rough language and frustration for hate, Randy. Or hell, maybe it is hate, but hate isn't necessarily bad, least of all if it's only leveled at a concept, like religious dogma. There are some things that it's okay to revile, when they cause harm to real people; I hate racism, and I hate the racist past of my country. Why wouldn't I? It's a shameful chapter of history that only caused suffering; what is there to like?

Let's use one of y'all favorite images. Suppose a person who believed in unicorns showed up in the forum like I did, and started posting arguments for the existence of unicorns. Do you think that person would be the recipient of the vile memes, videos, language and blasphemy that were and are thrown at me on a daily basis?

Did you think your religion was the only thing getting ridiculed here? Matey, you need to look around a bit more; we've got political ridicule, pseudoscience ridicule, mythological ridicule of every stripe... you can't just hang around the religion threads and then conclude from that skewed sample size that we only have nasty things to say for religion. Do you know how many anti-vaccine threads have faced the same negative response? How many anti-science threads we've gone through? Just the other day I was giving shit to a bunch of self-styled "ghost hunters" in front of my mother-in-law, who believes in that crap. She managed to understand just fine that I was insulting the concept, not her or any real person. If you think you're the only one catching flack, then I have to say no, that's wrong. All bad ideas are ridiculed here, often in direct proportion to their impact on our lives.

That, by the way, is the area in which your analogy fails completely, because belief in unicorns isn't remotely similar to belief in god, is it? People haven't died in disagreements over belief in unicorns. People don't attempt to curtail the rights of others over their belief in unicorns. I don't have to endure mountains of words written to assert that because I don't believe in unicorns I can't be moral, or I'm somehow a lesser person, or I should be executed... I don't have flocks of unicornists lining up to impugn my character over my lack of belief there. In terms of real world effects, of actual relevance to who we are as people, there's no comparison at all between unicorns and religion, and yet it's such a common tactic from theists: if you wouldn't fight this hard over unicorns, it's inconsistent to do so over gods. As if the two are identical, conceptually.

But they aren't, and the comparison isn't valid no matter how many times I hear it.

Nope. Because no one is mad at unicorns, and they aren't mad at unicornists. But they ARE mad at Theos and theists, aren't they?

Hey, lemme know when unicornists start banding together to curtail yours or my freedoms: I'll be right beside you in your anger at that.

Has that ever happened, by the way? Has there ever been an objectionable social cause- hell, a social cause period- that unicornists have attempted to enshrine into law?

There are people here who can't even bring themselves to type the word "Bible" - it has to be "buy-bull". And it's not God - it's "sky-daddy". And those are the family-friendly examples. Or look at the subjects of some of the threads that have been started in the forum in the past few days. Do these sound like the kinds of things that healthy, happy and well-balanced people normally say? The kind of rage that causes people to go out to YouTube and look for some of the sick, twisted stuff that is posted here is something I cannot fathom. But I know its source. And you know what I mean.

Kinda hard to respond without examples, because what I see isn't anger. I just see my peeps: sure, their language might be rougher than you're used to, but not every country has the same aversions to swearing and dark humor that yours might. I'm Australian, for example, and the kind of stuff I would hear and say routinely in public in my hometown simply would not fly in the States. My wife is American, and the number of things I've had to stop saying around her, that sounded completely innocuous to my ears, but carried additional significance to hers, were quire surprising.

My point is, people are different, and they act in different manners. You might read this stuff and, because of how you're geared to react to this language, add an inflection that simply isn't there. My wife would think the world was ending every time I said "goddamn," even though to me it was just a fairly mild curse, not even an actual swear; two different reactions to the same piece of language. When I read these threads, I don't see the sort of frothing rage that you seem to; I just see people I've known for years, people I know to be kind and caring for the most part, doing what they do. If you see malice behind it, if you truly think that it's directed at your religion and nowhere else, then I'd encourage you to look up some of the nicer theists we've had; the Rayaans and Jacobsmooths, who actually interacted with us rather than treading through the same old apologetics ground and then speculating as to our evil motives when we didn't play along. Rayaan was even an administrator here, for a time.

You see hatred against religion in these posts. I say you should look a little deeper before you make those assumptions about the people here. Because every time we have discussions in the staff room about adding on new staff, every single time I've been privy to those discussions, we have a specific discussion about adding some more theists, some more christians, to our staff. More than a few times those theists even make it into the nominations. You talk about how much Stimbo and Becca and I hate you and your god, but that still happens, every time, and I can tell you that none of these people have ever so much as disagreed vocally with that notion.

So hey, maybe just consider the possibility that you're adding an inflection to the words that wasn't intended by their writers?

Why do you think this is a common talking point among Christians about atheists? Personally, I've never spoken to another Christian about this subject, so you must be getting that from somewhere else.

You're not the only christian to have used the "angry at god" line to us. Maybe it's not so common between christians, but you hear it a lot from the less sophisticated apologists- the Ray Comforts and Ken Hams- from the presuppositionalist camp, and from certain stripes of theists from all proselytizing religions, too. There's a reason almost every counter-apologetics resource will contain a (short, since there's not a lot to address there) response to the "you're just angry at god!" contention.