Young Americans abandon God in droves - Page 2

What does HIM have to do with this?

 

Christians do NOT beat people over the head about HIM. We only try to inform.

By writing screenplays about demons engaging in anal rape.

You can't possibly speak for every Christian. No two X-tians are even the same, you seem to adapt  your interpretation based on existing predjudice and pragmatism. One thing I have observed: you are, in the aggregate, hypocrites.

 

You're spelling HIM in all caps. I know my catechism. That isn't necessary.

Him?

 

 

I'd be hip to the idea that it's not worth getting all anti-theist in the main because most religious people are nice and helpful and generally stay out of the way.

But only if the example was, say, here.  Almost daily I seem to hear about some other way religion is deeply entrenched and protected in US politics, law, government, culture etc in frankly unsettling ways.  And the moderates seem quite content to let it happen, either through ignorance or they feel on the whole it's better that way ("They may not be my church, but if they believe in something at least it's alright").

The prickly moderates who tire of people attacking religion when they find it wholly good might feel less affronted if they fought for the secular cause as strongly as their numbers permitted.  That's my remote impression at least.

 

 

 

So, according to this poll by Gallup 46% (!) of Americans are creationists. Is it okay to say that's utterly ridiculous? Or does that make me a smug atheist asshole?

You're perfectly right that one person cannot speak for a very large and very heterogenous group. But if aggregate observations are cool, then I'd like to observe that, based on my observations from this thread, in the aggregate, atheists are loud-mouthed smug pricks who like to engage in quasi-intellectual circle-jerks about how advanced they are for being different than the people they don't like.

Or is that generalizing too much?

 

"Hey, what am I, chopped liver?"   

 

 

Dried prune, I thought.

All right dude, I used the word hypocrite, you dropped these gems of Christian forgiveness, "loud-mouthed, smug,, pricks,  quasi-intellectual,circle-jerks" etc.

 

Welcome to the circle jerk.

 

Athiests do not have a monopoly on smug. Christians seem smug and quasi-intellectual to me.

 

Maybe when people are sure of themselves about things we disagree with them on them seem smug.

 

 

I guess that wasn't clearly sarcastic enough; the point being that that's an equally comically broad "aggregate" generalization as your statement, and no more necessarily applicable to any one person in the set being generalized. Sorry, guess I should've made my sarcasm more obvious.

Sarcasm and irony do not always work on the internet.

 

Whatever, this is an unsolveable argument that has gone on for centuries and will continue as long.

Or maybe we solved it here today. <--Sarcasm.

Yes, my use of 'aggregate' was poorly concieved and could just as well have been 'anecdotelly', 'IMO'. I retract it out of courtesy and will try to judge the hypocrisy or non-hypocricy of self-declared Christians on a case by case basis.<--not sarcasm

when atheists are confident, they are looked on as being "smug"

 

when religious folk are confident, they're not 'smug', they're "pious"  

Oh no, they are also smug pricks!

Pious does not have the same negative connotation as smugness. There were even a couple of Popes with the moniker (just, kidding Pius not pious, haha).

 

How about sanctimonious?

 

Actually, I am going to stand my ground and say that smug can be applied to the religious. 

 

And in the spirit of sharing I will be more pious in smugness.

I am going on a limb here, but the fall of Christians from pious to smug, for me, has to be the change from the doctrine of faith and good works to a doctrine of faith alone. Like Patton Oswalt's joke on religion, if you are doing good things because your religion motivates you, more power to you. But if you are being motivated by religion and your behavior is abominable, then you deserve the ridicule.

 

My parents raised me relatively religious. We were a military family, so we never went to the same church often. Religion was in the home, not someplace we went. After my parents left the military and we settled in one place, I had a hard time going to any particular church because of the hypocrisy of the politics or social behavior of people outside of church.  Good work for me is essentially the Christ ethic, which is why my faith in the divinity of Christ makes it difficult for me to accept a modern, US church.  I still believe in God, just not the accumulated bullshit that tends to go along with the US Christian culture.

 

I think I would be Catholic, because of the ceremony and good works they institionalize, were it not for the tons of other things they condone or hide or ignore.

Taking another tack, I don't know if folks have heard of the Reasonable Doubts show, but a while back they all went on this very liberal religious radio show called Faith and Reason (you can listen to it here if you wanna).  I mainly mention it because it's a bit like a more polite version of page one.  It's really weird/interesting listening to these most vague and doubtful christians talking to atheists (ok it's probably really boring too, but it tickles my sociology nerve) and the question that still remains (and the guys actually ask it a couple of times), if you have all this doubt and faith & doctrine doesn't rule your life like a fundamentalist, why the hell not drop the whole thing?  What are you hanging on to this stuff for?

 

I kind of know the answer already, in a way.  It's driven into you from birth, the community aspect is deep in your life and then Pascal's Wager, so why the hell not? Although I doubt anyone would actually say that.  They'd give the wooly answers the pastors do on the show and suggest belief and non belief are somehow equal propositions in the search for truth (which is, sadly, hogwash).  Still fascinating to me though.  And, in a horrible irony, I do end up sounding like some proselytizer in these situations: why? why do it to yourself? cast aside your shackles and be free brothers and sisters!  The kingdom of earth and humanity is at hand! etc   You could do lots of things with the many brain processing cycles you free up from not thinking about this crap anymore.

Not going to have much impact i know, nothing makes people dig their heels in like telling them they've got it all wrong, particularly regarding even the vaguest faith, but it's honest.

I actually basically get where you're coming from there, Muzman. But I think that's getting at what is essentially the great tragedy of the American church (and, uh, here I go with the broad generalizations, but it does seem to be pretty widespread, as far as I've observed.) That is, I don't think that having faith inform your life is necessarily a binary divide between "not at all, but you pretend that it is because you're uncomfortable giving it up," and "every single waking moment of my life is spent thinking about my religion to the exclusion of everything else." It feels like a lot of people in modern American Christianity (can't speak for elsewhere in the world) have been pushing further and further to the side of fanaticism, dragging everybody they can with them, and the ones left behind all kind of edge uncomfortably to the side of what could be termed "social religion."

It ties in a lot with what MrTyres said about the extraneous bullshit that gets lumped in with the actual articles of faith. I'm not old enough to have been around for the Moral Majority, but it feels like that is essentially the nature of what's been going on, trying to "circle the wagons" because they think they're under attack by the entire secular world, and raising each generation to be successively more fanatic, and attempting to tie politics directly into their religion as if it's actually stated as such in Scripture, but losing more people in the process because they're increasingly more off-putting.

But the thing is, that doesn't have anything to do with Christianity itself, and it doesn't have to rule the life of everybody who calls themself a Christian, because Christianity is not something that is defined by consensus (least of all the consensus of a minority of crazies;) it's got a fairly clear basic founding document that can be worked from independently, and can be incorporated into a person's life in a meaningful way without being obsessive and without dragging in a whole lot of extra crap just because somebody acts like it's totally related.

I just saw read this....

 

 

also Special report -Mormonism besieged by the modern age

Just stumbled across this thread...

 

VTRan, do you seriously not understand how someone can be correct and still be a smug, patronizing asshole? Like you're being?

 

I agree with Michael Moore's politics, that doesn't mean I don't want to slap the guy sometimes.
 

 

are we dragging this back up after several weeks....? I had to reread it to refresh my memory.

 

One person's 'smug'.....

 

To a degree I was playing "devil's advocate" here,  but the truth is, I'm not going to be losing any sleep if someone thinks I'm "smug".

Hell(s), if it's coming from someone entrenched in organized religiosity, I'll wear that badge proudly.

 

When it comes to being patronizing...I have little patience when it comes to dealing with those individuals that like to paint themselves as "religious" especially since I have found most to be woefully ignorant of "their religion" to say nothing of "other peoples" religions...and don't get me started on the amount of hypocrisy present...sweet zombie jeebus.

 

So, what you may call patronizing, I'll call aggressive textual impatience with a "I drank too much coffee" chaser.   

 

As far as MM goes, I've never really thought of him as being 'smug'....I view him as being confident and unapologetic with his opinions.      

 

As far as slapping goes....the only two people that come to mind who, IMO, need a good slapping are Limbaugh and O'Reilly....ok, and maybe Coulter.

 

:)

So all you have to do in order to not be an arrogant twit is define your behavior as "not arrogant," with an added "and it wouldn't matter if I was because it's against people I don't like?"

Good to know, I'll file that one away for future reference.

 

....now who's being "smug"?

 

:)