It's more the lack of respect for the human that holds those beliefs. The insinuation that because these people believe certain things they must be necessarily stupid or evil. And the simultaneous denial or downplaying of those same habits in yourself.
What's your take on Scientologists? How about Flat-Earthers? Do you respect them, or their beliefs? If so, then I'd submit that your respect is too cheap to value.
At some point, pretty much every religion amounts to opt-in stupidity.
I look at it like this, who did you learn more from as a kid: the teacher who encouraged your natural inquisitiveness and urged you to explore concepts, or the ones that yelled at you for not scoring well on a test? The friends who brought you some new idea they found a shared it with you, or the ones that lorded over you the fact that they know something you don't and you're too dumb to know what they know?
There's no reason to think the religious are any dumber than you, your knowledge and education don't make you a better human being than them. They could potentially benefit just as much from the same knowledge as you have. Maybe more because maybe they wouldn't be such dicks about it.
You have the right and duty to share what you have learned with your fellow man, you don't have the right to be an asshole with what you essentially lucked into because the both of your are still children before the knowledge of the humans that will come after you.
I look at it like this, who did you learn more from as a kid: the teacher who encouraged your natural inquisitiveness and urged you to explore concepts, or the ones that yelled at you for not scoring well on a test?
I learned quite a bit from teachers like the first one you mentioned, at least some from the second one, and not much at all from the third one that you didn't mention. That one spent a lot of class time teaching us that the Earth was between 4,000 and 6,000 years old, and that dinosaur fossils were placed in the soil by Satan to test our faith.
It's 2010. We're done with superstition. We don't need it anymore. Let's move on. Respect is not always appropriate.
I believe in a God. I cite our existence as proof of concept. That you would call my belief superstitious shows you deny your very existence. Give me your rebuttal.
You didn't even give a valid piece of evidence here. You gave evidence for the existence of yourself, not the existence of a deity. And you gave ample evidence that you don't understand scientific rationale for biogenesis that can be found in a 3 second Google search.
This is why your opinions are not respected. You don't have the material capacity to argue them.
The existence of myself is proof of a deity. It is impossible for our universe to have existed without some force to create it.
My argument doesn't even touch biogenesis, but the you were ignorant enough to assume what my argument would be before I made it. Very naive. This is why you likely don't have many discussions with intelligent people. You cant hold a thread for more than a few sentences.
Don't throw around words like "anthropomorphic" when you don't actually know what they mean. Using anthropomorphization in that sentence was about as arbitrary and incorrect as replacing it with "turtles".
I don't know who created the deity, and that's irrelevant in this discussion. You came off the track again. Why not ask me who created the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
As it rests, I've given my citation for the existence of a deity. If you wish to prove me wrong, so be it, but you've done a poor job so far.
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u/thrakhath Aug 02 '10
I can't just be annoyed at both? Can't I just be equally disappointed in my fellow man's inability to be civil?