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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Needlessly antagonizing.  I did not even clue in to that.

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believers are antagonized very easily, as in "how dare you question my completely unsubstantiated belief?  It's my right to belief things for which there are no evidence!"[/quote]

It [b]is[/b] their right to believe whatever they choose, just as it's your right not to believe in a deity. When someone goes out of their way to poke at your belief/non-belief, it's annoying.

When Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons show up at your door (regardless of what you believe), or when someone pokes at your belief structure it's annoying, and under those circumstances you can launch with whatever arguments you choose, if you choose to engage.

Believers don't actually appreciate the constant societal drumbeat of organized religion that atheists are presented with, because it simply passes beneath conscious notice for them, but that doesn't mean that our pushing something back in their collective faces is the answer.

If the OP wanted to start a dialog, there were numerous ways to phrase it in an engaging way rather than just "Great quote about religion" followed by the text. If you want to get believers to think about/question this aspect of their belief structure, a bumper-sticker sound bite is unlikely to be the best way to do it.

So, either the OP genuinely wanted to start a dialog on the topic, but isn't sufficiently mature to understand why believers wouldn't react well to just having that sound bite thrown out there, or (and I think more likely) the OP saw this quote on an atheist site and decided to tweak the "illogical theists" with this awesome funny new idea he'd discovered.

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There seems to be a presumption that OP should have the highest motives when mentioning anything about atheism, so they will be seen as a "good" atheist and be an example for other atheists.  I don't see it that way.  The "great quote" wasn't high minded, but it certainly was accurate - as you acknowledge.  And you choose to protect beliefs you don't hold yourself.

Pushing something in their face may not be "the answer" but I think not pushing gets any minority group nowhere.  Imagine if racial minorities or women hadn't gotten in people's faces where they'd be today. - still cow-towing to the folks in charge - that's where -and being congratulated for "knowing their place" or castigated when they got a little uppity. Sort of the way atheists are treated today.

We have a right in this country to freedom of religion -- that's good, but it can be dangerous when it gets interpreted to mean a privilege to disregard evidence in favor of believing in some alternative, unprovable reality - and when people with various conflicting supernatural beliefs automatically receive more societal respect than people who reject the supernatural in favor of observable reality.

I don't think atheists deferring to religious people is going to help us any more than women being ladylike would have helped the women's movement. Everyone can't be an activist, but without activists, nothing changes.

A few religious people being offended by a blunt but true statement on an internet message board seems OK to me and not something to be avoided.[/quote]

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