RichardMNixon
New Member
I've lurked on religious forums. The general mood is : We feel very strongly about our faith, and if you'd like to join us you're welcome, and if not, then fair enough, god bless. Virtually no arrogance.
I've lurked and also participated in atheist forums. The general mood is : We are right, we are right, prove it, prove it, otherwise you're stupid. Us, arrogant? Naah, we just think that you must be stupid if what you say seems illogical to us.
More realistically, "God bless, even though you're going to suffer for eternity and we won't because the man in the sky likes us better." Don't confuse pious conceit with respect or humility. Or as I see more commonly, "Hmm, someone disagrees with us, let's ignore it and pretend it didn't happen." Have you seen the video explaining that the flood must be true or else the human population would be too large? I can't count how many times I've explained to those youtube users that the man in the video completely falsified his numbers and that the model would also predict the world would be overrun with ants. They just shove their fingers in their ears and shout "Nuh-uh!" If people present an original thought we reply with an original answer.
Contrarily, if someone quotes this as proof that Darwin himself didn't believe evolution
without continuing it with the rest of the paragraphTo suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
ridicule is really the only response. We have answered that more times than we count.Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
It's not saying something illogical that upsets us: that can lead to an interesting discussion. We get upset when people say the same thing over and over and over. For instance:
I dislike what I call atheist fundamentalism the most because if the level of utter arrogance on atheist forums is anything to go by, it's a sure sign that given the chance, some, not all but a fair few atheists, would behave just as badly as (emphasis added) fundamentalist religious people.
Yes, I've already granted you that for the sake of argument. For the third or fourth time, why does A having the capacity to be equally bad as B make A worse than B?
I'm also not sure where these magical, indifferentist (indifferentism is a heresy FYI), other point of view-loving theists are. Are these the same theists who made death threats to remove a nonconfrontational atheist billboard? http://current.com/news/91446453_death-threats-force-removal-of-atheist-billboard.htm
Or the same theists who polled that atheists were the least trusted minority in America? http://atheism.about.com/od/atheistbigotryprejudice/a/AtheitsHated.htm
The theists who sent death threats over mistreatment of a cracker? http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/07/16/crackergate/
The theists who poured campaign funds (tax free since it's a church) into states they don't live in to prevent the expansion of civil rights for gays and then lied about it? http://www.examiner.com/x-52997-San-Diego-LGBT-Issues-Examiner~y2010m6d15-California-Ethics-Commission-finds-Mormons-guilty-on-13-counts-of-late-Prop-8-campaign-reporting