/
|_| <– Opened can of worms.

This is where the rubber meets the road, tradition of men meets Word of God and confusion is heaped upon confusion. But are you willing to shed the blinders and see clearly: are you willing to accept the Truth?

Keep asking questions.

I agree, we must bridge the gap between belief systems. The classic phrase of “agree to disagree” is so very applicable. Disagreement does not need to become a cause for dislike. I, as yourself, am always in favour of civil debate, and information exchange, but this is the kind of thing that ought to be done peacefully, and there are far too many on both sides that seem to want to start a war.

-Chicken

As far as I know, the Christian scriptures do not say that by not believing in God you are dead to him. As far as I can tell that’s just people making a poor representation of God and Christianity. The way the Theology goes is that God is loving, and desires the “lost sheep”. He is the loving father who eagerly waits for the “prodigal son” and the loving shepherd that goes out and searches for the “lost sheep”. That hardly sounds like being dead to Him. When I hear stories of what some christians tell some people…I really feel that those christians need to study scripture more because they don’t know what they’re talking about. What is true, is that according to the theology, if at the end of your life or at the end of the world you do not believe, then you are sent to hell (I’m not preaching hellfire at you, I’m just explaining the theology). However, the scriptures also say that He doesn’t desire that “any should perish”. Meaning that although some will go to hell, it’s not because He hates them, in fact, He would have much liked to have them saved, but by their own choice they have found themselves there.

As for “calling me out”. Any time you feel really lucky, go ahead.

This is as polite as I can get without outrightly calling you out. If you take it as an insult, fine…

You are really being a pompous ass, you do know that?

Not that I care for an instant what you or anyone else allegedly thinks.

Religion is not likely to go away any time soon, no matter how much abuse you throw at those who comment here. We have to live on the same planet with theists and, fortunately, most of them are decent human beings. We need to be able to talk with them and show them that we are not the monsters that their more zealous and ignorant co-religionists have painted. We need to show that nearly everything important to them is also important to us; we simply do not ascribe anything to spirits. We need, in fact, to engage the reasonable theists to keep the rabid ones in check. The only way to do that is to carry on civil discussions.

Civil discussions do not occur with someone whose only mode of address is invective. Whatever valid points a rude person makes are obscured by the noise of the insult and abuse; the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. Civil discussions are rendered harder for others when such behavior is occurring in the same neighborhood; it is external noise for which no effective shielding is available.

Those same civil discussions may also help readers who have begun to doubt religion but are grappling with all the issues that theBEattitude and others have described; issues that apparently never bothered you but are very real to many people. Invective, with its terrible SNR, is useless for this or even counterproductive.

Now you tell us that you are creating this noise knowingly and on purpose for your own amusement without regard to its effect on other non-believers:

Yes, I admit I am deliberately trying to be a bit obnoxious about it. But it’s the only think amusing I find about religion. If we can’t have a little fun while we’re here. what’s the point?

We no longer have the luxury of imagining that your behavior is the result of limited or impaired intellect. We now know that you are intentionally goading theists.

Even ignoring its effect on efforts to educate about atheism and to improve relations with believers, this belligerence stirs up enmity, will confirm the stereotypes of non-believers that are spread by fundamentalists, and will make matters worse.

Yes, I admit I am deliberately trying to be a bit obnoxious about it. But it’s the only think amusing I find about religion. If we can’t have a little fun while we’re here. what’s the point?