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Stops Along the Journey (from Atheist Revolution)

Here are a few comments I posted in response to a post on Atheist Revolution. Vjack, the author of Atheist Revolution, has since stopped using Haloscan for comments and now uses Intense Debate. I guess Google does not allow comments. (Now vjack requires an Intense Debate account to comment. I may or may not get one.) Anyway, some of this may not be too clear since I am trying to reconstruct my thoughts from a few fragments posted a year earlier. I should probably get into the habit of expanding on my comments here when I post something. Hopefully I will work through the backlog soon.


I think that these comments were in response to the post  Stops Along the Journey From Christian to Atheist . It looks like somebody posted a reply in May, 2009.

So some people comment about their journey to atheism, and then some guy (named Thomas) says that atheism is a religion. Here is my reply on 2008-07-30 23:33:00:

On 07.27.08 - 2:41 pm, Thomas said:

Anyone that REALLY SEES Jesus, will follow him. Why would you reject some one who loves you? And if you reject him, he will still love you. Neither atheism or 'religion' offers that kind of acceptance. You can never put Jesus in with the religious crowd.

So in other words, "if you don't believe that my religion is true, you're doing it wrong." (As opposed to, say, the religion not having any validity in the first place.) I think a lot of us have heard that.

Then Thomas says
So in other words, Christians believe what they believe. Why are you upset with them for that? If you don't believe what a true Christian believes, they will still love you even if you don't accept it. I emphasize TRUE Christian since not everyone who 'says' they are a Christian necessarily represents it correctly.

Besides, if Christians ARE wrong, at least they are happy. You have to be glad for them for that.

I did not have a reply for that at the time, but now I have a few comments: I am not upset with Christians for believing what they believe. I am upset with them for trying to force their beliefs on everybody else via legislation, and telling me that I am "angry at God" when I am not. (Granted, there is not necessarily a lot of overlap between those statements.) A few people pointed out that Thomas was engaging in the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. He was also pushing the "Jesus isn't about religion" line, which is false.

Later I replied on the page ast 2008-07-31 07.31.08 - 11:03:00:
Thomas:
What I meant was that you seem to think that atheists do not understand religion. (Yes, I know that any sentence with the phrase "you seem to think XXX" sounds presumptuous.)

A lot of atheists have read the Bible. Some attended church and prayed for many years. Some have degrees in theology. Some were even pastors. Yet many Christians will say that ex-Christians had "false conversions," that they were not really a true Christian. How do you know?

A lot of Christians do not like to hear this, but there are a lot of people who have put a lot of effort into looking for/knowing God, Jesus, whomever.

Your comment that "Anyone that REALLY SEES Jesus, will follow him" struck me as another way of telling people that they had a "false conversion". It seems like a glib, slightly insulting dismissal. I think Christians are wrong, but I do not doubt their sincerity. (Except maybe the preachers of the "Prosperity Gospel".)

One of my big beefs is that a lot of Christians seem to assume that atheists have never been to church or read the Bible. If they find out we have, they just say "You weren't a real Christian" (they will even say this to people who were pastors/ministers for years) or you didn't interpret the Bible correctly, or you went to the wrong church. In other words, they always seem to have another BS reason why you "didn't do it right." I have to admit now that I may not have conveyed that in my first comment.

Then someone quoted Thomas' line ""So in other words, Christians believe what they believe. Why are you upset with them for that?"", and the reply was what I stated above: We don't hate Christians, we just do not want them forcing their religion on everybody else. Then Thomas brings up the Evil Homosexual Agenda. He mentions that just as you could use a screwdriver for a hammer, that is not its "intended purpose".

So I replied with this at 2008-08-01 13:46:00:
At 08.01.08 - 8:50 am Thomas, said
The rear is an exit, not an entrance. Biology 101. You block the exit and you have big time problems.

It's not being blocked 24/7.

I heard through the grapevine English woman like to, um, "have the exit blocked", as Thomas put it.

The problem is that English women also drink, smoke, and get into fights at soccer games. Women who have bad habits that I like also tend to have bad habits that I do not like.

Also: Once again, this sounds like control. "Things can only be used for their intended purpose (particularly as I define it)."