Spike's Bitches 31: We're Motivated Go-getters.
[NAFDA] Spike-centric discussion. Lusty, lewd (only occasionally crude), risque (and frisque), bawdy (Oh, lawdy!), flirty ('cuz we're purty), raunchy talk inside. Caveat lector.
Proselytizing athiests fit a category well known in all belief systems -- wackos.
Do people really run into proselytizing atheists?
Proselytizing atheists weren't the people (and evangelizing wasn't the action) I was trying to identify, when I was talking about a similarity I see between atheists and fundamentalist Christians. I was trying to discuss a certain read of the Bible, not any other behavior.
I can see believing in the supernatural in some definition without believing in god. Although you'd have to define both terms more specifically than we've (mostly) been doing here.
I can see this too, I just find it contradictory in hard-line atheists, which I would think pull you out of the above category.
I can sort of see it, but honestly without the aformentioned definition of terms, I think the claim to atheism while believing there are ghosts is hair-splitting in a way, too. It's acknowledging the supernatural, the non-material, the spiritual. To me, one person's ghost is another person's deity.
Because of the whole blinvisible thing.
What does invisibility confer other than being hard to see? What sort of power or specialness is there?
Do people really run into proselytizing atheists?
Yes, they tend to be very bent on calling me an idiot, sheep, etc. for believing something unknowable. Which cracks me up since so do they.
For me, I'd say it's an inconsistency because the existence of ghosts seems to automatically imply the existence of a soul
Ehhhhhh. You can believe that ghosts are the residual energy left behind by someone without believing in a soul. Or at least I can.
But I am also often the uber-agnostic to end all agnostics. Don't know, don't much care, do know that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, and I'm good with that.
I got a couple of issues of an athiest magazine once that was all full of ways to expose the fallacy of belief in god among your friends and neighbors. Very strident and *very* outwardly directed, i.e., how do we convince them all what fools they are. Put me right off by the second page, I'll tell you what.
Do people really run into proselytizing atheists?
Oh, absolutely. Disdain, vocal disdain, for religion as well as an intent to disassemble other people's faith--does that count?
I'd classify myself as agnostic as well. I was raised Catholic, which really turned me off to religion in general. I've not heard of/found a religion that quite fits my belief system. The notion that you must be "good" so that God will let you into heaven irks me. I think it's a truer person that is "good" because it's the right thing to do.
Note: I do not believe that these are mutually exclusive. Of course there are religious people that fit the right thing to do model as well.
Oh, absolutely. Disdain, vocal disdain, for religion as well as an intent to disassemble other people's faith--does that count?
Oh, well, I've certainly run into that. I think I was interpreting it more along the lines of what brenda mentions, with that magazine, though.
I mean, can you believe in God and be absolutely sure other portions of the supernatural don't exist?
I suppose you can, but that seems illogical to me, somehow. I wonder if there is any religion with a deity, that otherwise rules out the supernatural.
Ehhhhhh. You can believe that ghosts are the residual energy left behind by someone without believing in a soul. Or at least I can.
At what point are you just choosing not to call it a soul?
Do people really run into proselytizing atheists?
Yup. There are some scampering around DailyKos and the LTE columns of Salon.com. They're the most perfect parallel imaginable to those evangelizers who occasionally pester you while you were minding your own business on the bus or at the ATM or whatnot; they'll bust into any conversation, any thread on almost any topic with a rant about how anyone who believes in any kind of mythic sky daddy is deluded and dangerous and probably clinically insane, and the US will never become a truly progressive nation until we are all militant atheists.
Blessedly, even most of the other atheists @@ at them when they go on like this, but they do exist.
I suppose you can, but that seems illogical to me, somehow
I don't see why the existence of God should imply, say, that the river over there has a soul, or that fairies exist, or that I can cast spells, or any of a number of other supernatural concepts. Accepting God doesn't, to me, even have to open the door to things like that.
At what point are you just choosing not to call it a soul?
How do you define a soul? That's a good place to start.
I think I was interpreting it more along the lines of what brenda mentions, with that magazine, though.
A proselytising Christian is one that tries to convert me to their faith. I flip that to define a proselytising atheist as someone who tries to convert a religious person to atheism.
