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Forever White Belt
Stranger


Registered: 04/27/10
Posts: 237
Last seen: 4 years, 6 months
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Respecting others
#14436277 - 05/11/11 06:30 PM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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I am a Christian (take what you want from that) I have been wondering something about the whole bashing religion trend.
IMHO the Christian faith or the message of Christ is misunderstood by many. IMHO I believe many who are non believers are so because they have not had a personal experience with "God"
Regardless of what you truly end up believing in at the end of the day I really don't see how people who are supposedly so logical minded are so childish and petty.
I can understand disagreement.
I can understand disbelief.
What I do not understand is the lack of respect and self control in the dialogue on these topics.
I mean when I hear someone who is supposed to be as "intelligent" as Richard Dawkins talk about giant pink teapots in the sky and so on , I have a hard time grasping where belittling the person your trying to understand something about or from fits into the conversation...
-------------------- The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. J. B. S. Haldane The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
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conan
Alternate Internet Ego



Registered: 09/03/06
Posts: 501
Loc: Austin, TX
Last seen: 9 years, 2 months
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Quote:
Forever White Belt said: I mean when I hear someone who is supposed to be as "intelligent" as Richard Dawkins talk about giant pink teapots in the sky and so on , I have a hard time grasping where belittling the person your trying to understand something about or from fits into the conversation...
When I read The God Delusion I remember thinking he did approach rather agressively, and I think he even reserved a whole chapter on why he is so rough with his intellectual attack. Just his style I guess.
Quote:
IMHO I believe many who are non believers are so because they have not had a personal experience with "God"
Does it stretch your rules about what "God" is too far to allow "God" to be something you have never imagined before?
Allow yourself the possibility that you may actually be wrong.
You may be pleasantly surprised.
-------------------- Be Here Now
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Sorealism
Knowledge is Power



Registered: 08/04/06
Posts: 196
Last seen: 11 years, 1 month
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Re: Respecting others [Re: conan]
#14436406 - 05/11/11 07:00 PM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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Quote:
Allow yourself the possibility that you may actually be wrong.
You may be pleasantly surprised.
Wise words!
IMHO I agree there shouldn't be so much bashing of religion. I think what happens is people are so 'brainwashed' about their own beliefs/religion that they could not possibly begin to see any fault or inconsistencies in their own religion. I use the term brainwashed because generally people are born into a religion, most of the time it is not the individuals choice or will to practice that religion. It would be interesting to see if one were to atually choose a religion (if one wanted to) rather than being brought up into, just how many christians, jewish, islamic, buddhist etc. people there would be in the world, especially these days.
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Buckthorn
Stranger

Registered: 07/25/08
Posts: 4,561
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Re: Respecting others [Re: Sorealism]
#14436628 - 05/11/11 07:50 PM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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Respect to me is a simple downward nod
Respect for someone elses beliefs which are not congruent with your own is purely retarded and hyprocritical
My only true belief is there is One God.
Jesus was just a man
I am just a man
I am a child of God, The One God, Immortal
IT is what IT is
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TheEnd
Strange Daze


Registered: 09/04/06
Posts: 1,021
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Re: Respecting others [Re: Buckthorn]
#14438469 - 05/12/11 02:45 AM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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I also agree that people don't practice enough tolerance towards other peoples religions, and can end up being disrespectful towards a person or person's because of it.
It works the other way too. People that feel the need to "spread the word", to ME, are also being disrespectful towards anyone that has already chosen to walk the path of a non-religious sort. Or the fact that when one does decide to visit a church or similar religious setting, if you are unknown, members of that congregation seem to feel the need to interrogate the visitor to some extent, in order to have a better understanding of what that person beleives. Some people's relationship with God goes far beyond what any church or religion has to offer, and having strangers asking you questions that to some people are VERY personal, can leave a person feeling violated and in no hurry to return to that kind of setting. Religions and churches take a team effort in order for them to "succeed". If one person doesn't march to the beat of the same drum, they will usually end up being left out of the group to some extent.
I was raised Christian, but I am no longer a Christian, and now that I look back, I may have never really been a Christian, but just doing what I was supposed to do because thats what I was taught.
There are always two sides to everything, and only understanding one side will guarentee ignorance.
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deCypher



Registered: 02/10/08
Posts: 56,232
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Quote:
Forever White Belt said: I mean when I hear someone who is supposed to be as "intelligent" as Richard Dawkins talk about giant pink teapots in the sky and so on , I have a hard time grasping where belittling the person your trying to understand something about or from fits into the conversation...
Dawkins is quite intelligent IMO, albeit feisty whenever debating theists. Also the Flying Teapot argument was first coined by Bertrand Russell and isn't intended to be derogatory; rather it points out the valid philosophical point that the burden of proof rests on the person making unverifiable claims.
-------------------- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
 
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MarkostheGnostic
Elder


Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida
Last seen: 3 years, 3 days
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-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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c0sm0nautt

Registered: 05/19/08
Posts: 10,303
Loc: The Astral Realm
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“Away, then, with the fiction and workings of discursive reason, either for or against Christianity! They are only the wanton spirit of the mind, whilst ignorant of God and insensible of its own nature and condition. Death and life are the only things in question; life is God living and working in the soul; death is the soul living and working according to the sense and reason of bestial flesh and blood. Both this life and this death are of their own growth, growing from their own seed within us, not as busy reason talks and directs, but as the heart turns neither to one or the other."
- William Law (from Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy)
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dustinthewind13
Fool


Registered: 11/05/10
Posts: 5,219
Loc: Being a burden
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Quote:
c0sm0nautt said: “Away, then, with the fiction and workings of discursive reason, either for or against Christianity! They are only the wanton spirit of the mind, whilst ignorant of God and insensible of its own nature and condition. Death and life are the only things in question; life is God living and working in the soul; death is the soul living and working according to the sense and reason of bestial flesh and blood. Both this life and this death are of their own growth, growing from their own seed within us, not as busy reason talks and directs, but as the heart turns neither to one or the other."
- William Law (from Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy)
The definition for life and death is confusing . I'm getting a pantheistic perspective from it though.
-------------------- "It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and forget his own." - Marcus Tullius Cicero "A room without books is like a body without a soul." - Marcus Tullius Cicero "Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it." -Thomas Jefferson
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