"The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us..." should we be grateful?

[Pyrrho]

Honestly, how would you know?  Many of us address religion the way we do because we care a great deal...just not about your religion, or your religious sensibilities.  You may feel that this expresses some lack in -us-, but it could just as easily be pointed to as your feeling that your religious sensibilities should be privileged wherever you go, whomever you interact with.

Food for thought.

If you know that making fun of someone's beliefs to their face hurts their feelings, and you do it anyway, then you don't care about their feelings. And if you don't care about a person's feelings, I don't know how you can say you care about them.

If you have a dear friend who is falling into some pretty messed up, harmful ways of thinking, you can still sit down and have a serious conversation with him and be honest with him. But there is a respectful and disrespectful way of doing it. And how you approach it will show how well you care.

Which is more respectful of a person, challenging their false and silly ideas (while hoping that they might realize their error), or leaving them with their false and silly beliefs?

Some ideas are so silly that it is difficult to seem respectful of the person when one is discussing how completely idiotic and ridiculous the beliefs are.  And pretending that stupid ideas are not stupid gives a very wrong impression.  Do you value honesty and openness, or do you want to pretend that silly ideas are not silly?

If your adult friend believes in the tooth fairy, how do you react?  Do you pretend that there is even a tiny bit of sense to such an idiotic belief?

Let us take the idea further.  Suppose that your friend is not only privately believing in the tooth fairy (which, if it were truly private, you could not know about it all), but also acts on that belief in a manner which is detrimental to society.  How does that influence your interactions with your friend?


And when you come to a web site, which you know is devoted to not believing in your invisible friend (or anyone else's invisible friends), and you tell the people there that you have an invisible friend, what sort of reaction do you expect to get?  The fact that interactions here are different from interactions one typically has in person is in part due to the purpose of the site.  If, in real life, you go to an atheist meeting, what sort of reaction would you expect to get from telling them all that you believe in a god?  What kind of reaction would they get, going to a religious meeting and telling the religious people that there is no god?  Context matters for many things, and when you go to a meeting place that has a specific purpose, you should have different expectations than when you go to some other sort of place.