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Darth Wong wrote:

IG-88E wrote:Y'know Rob, despite liking you on the board, I have a massive urge to smack you IRL. WTF did they ever do to you, that you feel such an urge to tell them off? If their beliefs offend you, fine, be offended and shut the fuck up about it. You only have a right to complain when their belief inturde on yours. 'Freedom of Religion' ring a bell?

"Freedom of speech" ring a bell? How is anyone's freedom of religion damaged by criticism? Christians attack every other religion on a daily basis, in sermons and on TV. Why do they expect to be immune to counterattack?

The problem here,Mike, is we are talkign about Moderate Christians. The people like myself who do not throw their beliefs on others, the ones who quietly live our lives taking strength in our faith without forcing it down the throats of others. You are focusing, as usual, on the extremes, rather than the subject we speak of.

And why the fuck are you attacking Christians? Remove 'Christian' from your rant, and you can replace it with dozens of different names. WTF makes moderate Chistians so fucking different?

They worship a God who is defined by a Bible which is full of abhorrent hatred. Many of them don't even realize this, but there are differing schools of thought on the validity of pleading ignorance.

So you think all of us hold the Bible and God as portrayed in the old testament to be pure truth? I find it rather odd that you are here claiming to know the system of beliefs for a group of people when I can turn and tell you that you're falt out wrong.

And I think you're a bigot. We're even.

Unlike most bigots, Robert can say two things:

1) Christians are not forced to be Christians. A Christian can change his beliefs voluntarily (unlike a black guy who obviously cannot change the colour of his skin, Michael Jackson excepted).

So what you're saying is that his bigotry can be excused because he's bigoted against a choice the person made. Does this mean we have the right to hate gays because they have made a lifestyle choice?

2) Christians largely defend the moral authority of a book called the Bible, which is morally abhorrent in many ways. By choosing to defend something which is morally abhorrent, they make themselves answerable for its flaws.

I'm rather amazed by this as most of the Christians I associate myself with couldn't care two shits less about the amoralities of the old testament and tend to focus more on the new testament and the gospels in particular.

The average bigot cannot point to any doctrines which are known to be voluntarily upheld by the target of his bigotry.

Except for homophobes so I guess being a homophobe is okay then.

The only place where I would differ from him is that I know many Christians who willingly concede that the Bible is full of evil ideas (Brian Young, for example).

Oh okay then I withdraw the above statement regarding Christians who acknowledge the evils in the Bible. However I owuld caution that Brian is much more an example of moderate Christians which...is what we are talking about in the first place.

CmdrWilkens wrote:So you think all of us hold the Bible and God as portrayed in the old testament to be pure truth? I find it rather odd that you are here claiming to know the system of beliefs for a group of people when I can turn and tell you that you're falt out wrong.

According to Time Magazine, nearly half of Americans do precisely that. I'm not saying that it's everyone, but it's a distortion to make these kooks out as a small minority of extremists.

1) Christians are not forced to be Christians. A Christian can change his beliefs voluntarily (unlike a black guy who obviously cannot change the colour of his skin, Michael Jackson excepted).

So what you're saying is that his bigotry can be excused because he's bigoted against a choice the person made. Does this mean we have the right to hate gays because they have made a lifestyle choice?

They didn't. No one chooses his sexual orientation. Did you sit up in bed one morning when you were 14 years old and decide to be attracted to girls? Of course not; it's just the way you are.

2) Christians largely defend the moral authority of a book called the Bible, which is morally abhorrent in many ways. By choosing to defend something which is morally abhorrent, they make themselves answerable for its flaws.

I'm rather amazed by this as most of the Christians I associate myself with couldn't care two shits less about the amoralities of the old testament and tend to focus more on the new testament and the gospels in particular.

The New Testament in which Jesus promises that in the Kingdom of God, it will be better for a man to have weights hung around his neck and dropped to the bottom of the sea rather than turning people away from his religion? The one where half of his parables end in the man being tortured, "and that it what it will be like in the Kingdom of Heaven"? The one where you are "saved" from eternal torture at God's hands by pledging allegiance to him, thus making him the biggest cronyist in the universe? Biblical morality is not cleaned up by simply excising the OT; many of the problems of OT thinking still extend into the NT.

The average bigot cannot point to any doctrines which are known to be voluntarily upheld by the target of his bigotry.

Except for homophobes so I guess being a homophobe is okay then.

Homosexuality is not a doctrine. There are no Scriptures of homosexuality which gays hold up as "The Good Book" and in which they codify their beliefs.

The only place where I would differ from him is that I know many Christians who willingly concede that the Bible is full of evil ideas (Brian Young, for example).

Oh okay then I withdraw the above statement regarding Christians who acknowledge the evils in the Bible. However I owuld caution that Brian is much more an example of moderate Christians which...is what we are talking about in the first place.

I never said moderate Christians don't exist. But I think there aren't as many of them as some would think.

Darth Wong wrote:They didn't. No one chooses his sexual orientation. Did you sit up in bed one morning when you were 14 years old and decide to be attracted to girls? Of course not; it's just the way you are.

Oh and speaking of this, it doesn't matter if it's genetic or social because such even if it's only social it is determined by the aspects of one's experiences throughout his life and the subsequent formation of someones personality, which is the definition of what you are.

I'm just saying that since people sometimes seems to think that if it's a social thing that it's not who you are and that you can change it, as opposed to it being genetic.

Ofcourse, can one also use this for Christians, a child growing up with Christian beliefs and indoctrination would form his mind in a specific way, so could it be for some people, being a Christian is just the way you are?

Robert Treder wrote:Here's my rant:

I've been noticing on the boards and in real life, that after nearly every mention of the shittiness of Christianity, every moderate or liberal Christian chimes in to remind us that only fundies are crazy, and at least one person sees fit to accuse atheists of being just as irrational as fundies.
Since when are nice Christians off-limits for criticism? I realize that they don't withhold condoms, go on crusades, burn Jews, or sell Bibles door-to-door, but they still ascribe to a stupid fucking set of beliefs, and in my book, that's grounds for me making fun of them.
I'm sick of people thinking that just because they're respectful with their beliefs, their beliefs are any more respectable.
So, to Christians everywhere, know that I think you're bad people. And no, I don't have to qualify that assertion, because you know very well of the various reasons that your belief systems are stupid bullshit. You simply choose to ignore it. You pretend that there's some virtue in irrationality.
I'm not, of course, advocating any action, physical or otherwise, against Chritians, I'm just saying that I'm sick of seeing Christians hide behind their wall of piety, assuming that they're unassailable just because they keep their stupid beliefs to themselves instead of acting on them.

Merry Christmas.

-waves hand- how about christian maltheists? do they fit ok in your mind?

Darth Wong wrote:

CmdrWilkens wrote:Oh okay then I withdraw the above statement regarding Christians who acknowledge the evils in the Bible. However I owuld caution that Brian is much more an example of moderate Christians which...is what we are talking about in the first place.

I never said moderate Christians don't exist. But I think there aren't as many of them as some would think.

Well let me clarify that most of my ire comes as one of the moderate Christians who Treder attacked. I find his position defenseless and the defense raised for his position misdirected. In other words his attack was against moderate Christians and most of your response was geared towards more of the fundamentalists.

C.S. Strowbridge wrote:Didn't one of the Stevens leave the show?

Steve Carrell left for a while, but he has returned, and Stephen Colbert is still there, as fucked up and twisted as ever -- he's probably the funniest person on the show.

As for the whole "moderate Christians" deal, most Christians I know are moderates, but they're simply ignorant of the Bible. They lead their lives by largely the same principles that I do; they just assume that the Bible teaches those principles and that it's the origin of them.

Of course, most of the Christians I know are from Catholic school. They never once were exposed to an environment or belief which directly criticized the Bible, and they were indoctrinated to the extent that defending the Bible became a knee-jerk reaction, even when the criticism was perfectly legitimate. Hell, I used to be like that. I always started from the assumption that the Bible was right, so I used many of the common justifications for atrocities like the Great Flood or God's various smitings.

However, most moderate Christians -- and I mean the ones that actually do believe in Christianity; lots of people pay lip service to it or pray whenever a loved one dies, but they give little consideration to it in their daily lives -- subscribe to the idiotic doctrine of "True Christianity."

For those of you who don't know, True Christianity is the latest attempt by Christians to disassociate their belief system from its bloody and violent past. True Christianity assumes that all Christians are moral, and that no person responsible for mass-murders or genocide -- particularly historical figures, like Hitler -- was a true Christian. People who buy into True Christianity believe that you get to Heaven by having faith and doing good works, even though Jesus never said anything of the sort in the Bible, and many times, gave the impression that faith was the only requirement. Thus, if you profess a belief in Jesus being the son of God, go to church every Sunday and burden yourself with unhealthy amounts of sexual repression, it's still not good enough to call yourself a Christian. Religious bigots like Jonathon Boyd think that good works should come from faith, so if you're not doing good works, you don't have faith, so you're not a Christian. Beautiful display of circular reasoning.

This True Christianity garbage is what bothers me about most moderate Christians. There are the ones, like my best friend, who admit that their beliefs have no logical backing, that the Bible is full of atrocious material and refuse to believe that someone like me, who leads a perfectly decent life, would go to Hell just for using his reasoning faculties. They're pretty rare, though.

When all is said and done, people tend to pick the belief system that they think works best for them. Some people, for whatever reason, just like Christianity for what it is or what they think it is. And that's fine. Although, to be fair, lots of people simply aren't given a choice. From birth, they're surrounded by one religion and told it's right, so when the times comes for them to make their own decisions, of course they choose the religion they grew up with.