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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So...whenever religious people talk amongst ourselves about stuff like this, I have literally never heard anyone put down atheists or even reference atheists at all.. Not even, "at least I'll feel smug that I wasn't an atheist!" No religious person talks like that, unless they are a cartoon on TV or an actual fanatic. Most people who are believers (and also not fanatic Christian evangelists, which most of us aren't) are happy to just let atheists do their thing and never bring it up.

So when atheists are doing the offhand-condescension move, like, "well I wish I could be dumb enough to believe in god, what a pity I'm not dumb," with the obvious implication that anyone who differs in opinion is dumb, I [i]kinda[/i] lose respect for you guys. And I don't see a big difference between you and the evangelists. Just saying.[/quote]

I agree with you that the "dumb" comment above was out of line. But I also think you're putting blinders on if you don't think a huge percentage of believers are biased against athiests. See, for example, the person who +1000ed you below who has out of hand rejected a dozen people telling him it would be personally hard for them to accept God by saying they are actively trying to force God out of their lives. But more importantly, I think there's a strong argument that athiests are literally the group it is most acceptable to overtly discriminate against in public life. See, for example, polls showing that less than half of people could vote for an atheist or agnostic for president. Why? Because they don't accept one particular non-rational belief? (And yes, while I think it is offensive to call faith in God dumb, I do think it's fair to call it non-rational or even irrational. See, for example, Robert McCauley's Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not, which is an excellent defense of religion but not from its logical structure. Or see Soren Kierkegaard's explication of the Isaac sacrifice where he describes religious faith's fundamental underpinning bein irrationality. Kierkegaard, of course, was both profoundly religious and one of the smartest people ever to live, so he's surely not calling religious faith "dumb.").

Presumably a large part of the anti-athiest polling stems from an appallingly large number of people, including some prominent academics, who believe that morality must stem from religion. I've always found this idea jarring. For one thing, Socrates, two millenia ago, made a pretty darned persuasive case that God must declare actions moral because of their intrinsic morality, rather than actions having instrinsic morality because God so declared them. But more importantly, I find it kind of horrifying the implication of the belief that morals exist only in God. If you believe this, does that mean, if, tomorrow, you suffer a Job-like loss of faith, you would then consider yourself free to murder and steal? That one necessary consequence of being an atheist or agnostic is that it requires you to ground your morals in universality rather than faith seems like one of those belief-systems' major benefits, not a flaw.

In any case, I certainly believe you that you don't diss on athiests at your prayer groups. But you're also avoiding reality if you don't think athiests are aggressively shunned in American life.[/quote]

I'm the PP you responded to. Thank you for opening my eyes and teaching me your perspective. (And yes, I did not at all agree with the stance that the +1000 poster took.) I didn't realize atheists experienced discrimination to that level.[/quote]

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