Hello folks
I have been kicking around this forum a couple of days and mostly like what I see. I would like to test the waters more actively by bringing up an issue I've been having with a couple of other forums and see how it plays out here.
I am against abuse.
I see abuse as being binary, in that if someone intends their actions or comments to cause harm for which the recipient can receive no benefit, that action or comment is unnecessary. Therefore, an action is either abusive or it is not, based on the person's awareness of the possible outcomes and their intent with respect to that information. Abuse spans a wide spectrum, from spiteful words to murder, but the scale of the harm is orthogonal to whether or not harm was intended. I've had people attempt to abuse me and it was as water to a duck's back, but that doesn't mean that they weren't being abusive assholes.
The problem I have with people failing to treat abuse as binary is that they often try to make their own arbitrary point along the scale of harm and defend it as not being abusive because doing X would be so much worse. This thinking offers anyone except the worst person in all history examples they can turn to in order to show that their own actions are not abusive.
Because many atheists have not thought through what constitutes abuse thoroughly, they make abusive remarks on forums such as this that religious person X should be tortured for having done Y, or that David Mabus deserves to get raped in prison, when that style of vengeance thinking is ethically unsupportable. To decry the abuses of religions while promoting abuse in turn is hypocritical and destroys any ethical footing you might also be trying to use to defend your own rights on other fronts.
An abusive act doesn't make a person abusive in all aspects of their life for all time, but the things we write to each other on the internet will likely last longer than we do, so I figure it pays to think hard before blithely making an asshole out of yourself by advocating the same impositions on the lives of the people we disagree with that we are attempting to combat by reducing the influence of religion on our lives.
This is not to say that the ideas of the religious should be treated with kid gloves. Attack those ideas with vigour, but you don't need to attack the person at the same time. Tell them to fuck off and leave you alone (my main goal in my activism) but don't tell them they deserve to be fucked and burned and eaten by fire ants. That would be the rhetoric of an asshole, and if you want to call for equal treatment, that's a precedent you probably don't want made equal.
I look forward to the local atheist members' responses.
Theists can fuck off and leave me alone.
I have been kicking around this forum a couple of days and mostly like what I see. I would like to test the waters more actively by bringing up an issue I've been having with a couple of other forums and see how it plays out here.
I am against abuse.
I see abuse as being binary, in that if someone intends their actions or comments to cause harm for which the recipient can receive no benefit, that action or comment is unnecessary. Therefore, an action is either abusive or it is not, based on the person's awareness of the possible outcomes and their intent with respect to that information. Abuse spans a wide spectrum, from spiteful words to murder, but the scale of the harm is orthogonal to whether or not harm was intended. I've had people attempt to abuse me and it was as water to a duck's back, but that doesn't mean that they weren't being abusive assholes.
The problem I have with people failing to treat abuse as binary is that they often try to make their own arbitrary point along the scale of harm and defend it as not being abusive because doing X would be so much worse. This thinking offers anyone except the worst person in all history examples they can turn to in order to show that their own actions are not abusive.
Because many atheists have not thought through what constitutes abuse thoroughly, they make abusive remarks on forums such as this that religious person X should be tortured for having done Y, or that David Mabus deserves to get raped in prison, when that style of vengeance thinking is ethically unsupportable. To decry the abuses of religions while promoting abuse in turn is hypocritical and destroys any ethical footing you might also be trying to use to defend your own rights on other fronts.
An abusive act doesn't make a person abusive in all aspects of their life for all time, but the things we write to each other on the internet will likely last longer than we do, so I figure it pays to think hard before blithely making an asshole out of yourself by advocating the same impositions on the lives of the people we disagree with that we are attempting to combat by reducing the influence of religion on our lives.
This is not to say that the ideas of the religious should be treated with kid gloves. Attack those ideas with vigour, but you don't need to attack the person at the same time. Tell them to fuck off and leave you alone (my main goal in my activism) but don't tell them they deserve to be fucked and burned and eaten by fire ants. That would be the rhetoric of an asshole, and if you want to call for equal treatment, that's a precedent you probably don't want made equal.
I look forward to the local atheist members' responses.
Theists can fuck off and leave me alone.
