Posted: Sep 17, 2014 10:23 am
kravarnik wrote:
I was directed to this board due to me saying there are barely any civil atheistic forums, with a relatively large memberbase. I believe this thread to be redundant, as I believe the issue lies much deeper. To be more precise, it lies in the misconceptions about the opposite camp and especially the lack of interest for comprehending the opposition. And these misconceptions are not exclusive to atheists or theist, but to people in general.
What I mean is, if you view religion/non-religion/atheism/-insert what you like- as evil, irrational and stupid, then most likely you won't be handling its adherents in a good manner, since all you see in their actions are negative attributes. You won't be seeing your counterparts as people who genuinely seek the truth, as you do, but as evil people who try to win you on their side. Their ways and reasoning becomes deceptive to you, thus false and deservent of bad treatment. This does no good to anyone, nor the very purpose of discourse - to seek and find the truth.
I believe we need more comprehension. We need to understand that these people, who spit out words which are seemingly false and nonsensical, are just like us, trying to find the truth, or sharing what they deem to be truthful, even though, to us it's of no intellectual value. We need to understand that these people are like ourselves, although mistaken in our eyes. Try to avoid mockery, try to avoid the snarky remarks for easy points of wit, try to be more understanding, etc. This will only help, I promise you.
I am a Christian and I really hope there are people capable of understanding, capable of sensing genuineness.
One thing to remember here is that the word truth has multiple meanings and can refer to either subjective emotional truth or objective logical truth. So what it might mean to you may not mean the same to someone else. I tend to disregard the subjective emotional version myself because it does not have to conform to physical reality so is only true for the one believing in it. It therefore is not as valid as objective logical truth and so it is a false equivalence to assume otherwise
As you are new here you may not be familiar with how the site operates. It is expressly forbidden by the FUA to attack any member here but not to attack anything they post. So mockery and snark is perfectly legitimate when directed at the latter And as most of us here are atheists that means that religion is a fair target. So if you disapprove of that then maybe this is not the site for you. However I myself hope that you stay as we do not have many Christians here and it is always good to have those with a different worldview to the majority as it stops the site from becoming an echo chamber of itself even if unintentionally so. Though having said that there is actually much that we disagree on outside of religion so that is not in reality going to happen so just saying. Anyway welcome to Rat Skep