Its perfectly acceptable to be rude to religous people...

[startrek90]

Definately going to get flamed here but oh well.

I get the feeling that this is perfectly acceptable to be rude about religous people. From reading the threads on this forum, and my experiences in RL, the amount of rudeness and sometimes plain nastiness is awful.

I am religous. I don't care if people are not, if they go to church or how they live their own lives or raise their children. As far as I am concerned as long as you obey the law, do what you want.

So far I have seen people imply that all religous people are closing their childrens mind, are ignorant, bigots.... its horrible!

I don't deny that there are people who are that way and use religion as an excuse.... but quite frankly you can be ignorant and rude without religion.

I am being unreasonable to be offended, but it really bothers me that its culturally acceptable to be rude to and about people of faith. You wouldn't do it to someone from a different culture or race would you? I have never bothered anyone with my faith so please stop taking it as an insult!

(Just venting, been lambasted in RL for daring to buy my son a Noahs ark toy. I thought it was cute with all the animals etc... but apparently I am raising him to be ignorant, bigoted and stupid. He will hate gay people and women and generally be a horrible person.....apparently grrr )

Message from the 'militant atheists'

And I can't think why a belief in God makes a giant leap to an imaginary friend- I didn't even have one of those as a child.
Why not just respect the opinions of others? I can never underderstand why people make up their mind and think everyone should think the same. I can only put it down to insecurity.

mehitabel- I think TheCatAteMyTaxReturn previous post makes an interesting point in answer to yor question.

Yes - I burn people at the stake every week.

But you support an organisation that has burned and tirtured- and love a god who likes killing people.

• tortured.

KeepItSimple:

Lenin's specific animus against religion dictated the shape of Communist policy towards organised religion in the Soviet Union. He eliminated all philosophical opposition within the Bolshevik party that had the smallest whiff of being wishy washy on the subject of religion. Lenin was having none of that because he was at base a revolutionary (he inherited that element from Marx) whose atheistic foundation was the anti-theism of Feuerbach, whom he considered he had superseded, and to whose anti-theism he added his own personal zeal. Under Stalin, the debate between dialectical materialism and other forms of Marxism was settled by means of a bullet to the head.

This is what Lenin said about dialectic materialism:
'The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach in Germany – a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. Let us recall that the whole of Engels’s Anti-Dühring, which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist and atheist Dühring for not being a consistent materialist and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious philosophy. Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reproaches Feuerbach for combating religion not in order to destroy it, but in order to renovate it, to invent a new, “exalted” religion, and so forth....'
'...A Marxist must be a materialist, ie, an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist, ie, one who treats the struggle against religion not in an abstract way, not on the basis of remote, purely theoretical, never varying preaching, but in a concrete way, on the basis of the class struggle which is going on in practice and is educating the masses more and better than anything else could. A Marxist must be able to view the concrete situation as a whole, he must always be able to find the boundary between anarchism and opportunism (this boundary is relative, shifting and changeable, but it exists). And he must not succumb either to the abstract, verbal, but in reality empty “revolutionism” of the anarchist, or to the philistinism and opportunism of the petty bourgeois or liberal intellectual, who boggles at the struggle against religion, forgets that this is his duty, reconciles himself to belief in God, and is guided not by the interests of the class struggle but by the petty and mean consideration of offending nobody, repelling nobody and scaring nobody – by the sage rule: “live and let live”, etc, etc...'

And on religion:
'...The party of the proletariat demands that the state should declare religion a private matter, but does not regard the fight against the opium of the people, the fight against religious superstitions, etc, as a “private matter”. The opportunists distort the question to mean that the Social Democratic Party regards religion as a private matter!'

Plenty more here, from a collection first published in 1933 and reprinted in London in 2012.

My children are atheists. I can't understand this obsession with controlling the thoughts of others. So what? Am I supposed to be upset? Am I supposed to tell them what to think because I brought them into the world?

I haven't caught up on this thread, but this just came up on my FB feed, and I thought of math.

www.awkwardmomentsbible.com/project/kill-the-unicorns/

"so how about Islam? Some Muslims think that their particular god deserves respect to the extent that they will kill people who don't show him enough. How do you feel about that?"

Hakluyt, the 'particular God' of Islam is the same God that all the other Abrahamic traditions worship.

The attitude I have towards people who are so offensive as to demand respect for their position while refusing to accord it to others (Caffe for instance, HairyHandedFucker, and SGB also spring to mind) is one I have already posted.

And all people without a faith have been peace and love from the start of time? Pull the other one
It has always been about power- religion was an excuse.

Do you have this hot line to God ( seems odd if you have no belief) so that you know what God likes?

" I can't understand this obsession with controlling the thoughts of others. So what? Am I supposed to be upset?"

I don't want to control anyone's thoughts. Who does?

Apparently you do Hak as you belittle what I might think to a belief in fairies. Solidgoldbrass is very specific in what she wants everyone to think. I don't think you would be as laid back as me if your children became Christians.

So anyone who has ever done anything bad in the name of religion wasn't really doing it in the name of religion at all- they were doing it for power? Nothing to do with God at all? What about anyone who does anything good in the name of religion? Let me guess- chalk that one up for God.......

"Apparently you do Hak as you belittle what I might think to a belief in fairies"

You must know that I never said this. I can only assume you are taking the piss now.

I only read OP and not the 10000 of messages following and I wanted to share my experience of Noah's Ark and my kids.

I was brought up religious (in a xtian religious school no less) and now am atheist.

but there is a framed picture of Noah's Ark on DS's bedroom - I picked it up at a sale without thinking beyond oh that's a nice pic.

A few weeks ago apropos of nothing I pointed to the picture and asked my son, do you know the story? he did not.
So I started telling Noah's story. He literally screamed when I got to the flooding and drowning part and told me to stop, what a horrible story, why do you know this story, stop telling me this gross story.

So I stopped.
We never talked about Noah's ark again.

My kids had the Noah's Ark story in a book. They love macabre things though.

The difference between fairies and God is that fairies are paranormal while God is supernatural, surely?

But the Noah's Ark story isn't "macabre" in the way, eg. Goosebumps is. It's not macabre in a fun, or ironic, or "suspension of your disbelief for entertainment purposes" way.

As I mentioned, I was reared on these biblical stories, and I seemed to accept them as natural and obvious. It bothers me now, when I think back to it and wonder why didn't I protest?

Noah's ark is a horrific tale, genocide is never pleasant however you try to sugar coat it.

Mehitabel: I don't care what you (or any other gullible/deluded/superstitious individuals) think, or believe in. You have absolute freedom to believe whatever crap you like on your own time and in your own private spaces. You just don't get a plate on the table for your imaginary friend. Other people are at liberty to ignore your imaginary friend and laugh at the whole concept of imaginary friends. 'Yeah, right, whatever' is the most reasonable response to someone bleating on about something irrelevant and unimportant, whether that's gods, pixies or who's the best one in One Direction.

I don't think you read my post. In the name of religion. Really down to power- something lots of people want -whatever their belief of lack of belief.

If only everyone said 'yeah, right,whatever' there wouldn't be a problem!
Live and let live.

Live and let live

But that isn't the ethos of the church. I would be happy to live and let live if the church kept its greasy fingers out of my life.