This is why I think it is wrong to ridicule people's belief - it causes harm.
We are probably much more alike in this than you think. In my personal life, I walk carefully around people's feelings, and treat their belief systems as fragile--they are.
HOWEVER,
A thread set up for the express purpose of debating a particular set of values is, of course, a different set of circumstances. Points can be made with satire, irony, sarcasm, etc. Anyone grown enough to hang around an egg-head thread needs to understand that, in the end, nothing is personal. It is the principles and the argument that matter. I stopped contributing to Christian threads except for the odd innocuous remark, when I convinced myself that they had every right to express their points of view to one another without being challenged from outside...regardless of what I thought of those views.
There is another peculiarity to the topic of this thread: My experience has been that the Christian Soldier must be opposed in their every attempt to leapfrog reason. Otherwise, we do a disservice to reason, and to our own precious beliefs, and furthermore--we get driven over the cliff. When someone tells me that Egyptian magicians turned rivers into blood and created millions of frogs, and then lost the ability somewhere, but there is only one book that ever mentions these and other miraculous powers...I need to be as sarcastic as I can be in order to defend my belief system, which is that pigs don't fly. I don't believe unreasonable ideas are neutral. I believe they are dangerous. Did you know that many people have lost their lives by believing Jesus when He said that His followers could survive drinking poison or snakebite? There are threads for making those types of statements unchallenged. This is not one of them.
I took away your cows because they were flattening tires and they were working up to larger ideas. But what I cannot do is take away anyone's faith or beliefs. What I can do is vigorously defend my own. My beliefs in the possibility of a loving and rational God are just as worthy of defending as someone that believes the opposite. For people to insist that God (should such an one exist),is not loving and rational, is ridiculing, and mocking, my belief system.
Ridiculous ideas ridicule themselves. (So there)! Another blond moment from Solon! <ggg> |
