Quote:
Originally Posted by Claudius Galenus
Umm yes it is a warning that all you're going to accomplish is derail the discussion and make it lopsided. You have one example of atheists persecuting Christians. There are tons of examples of one religion persecuting another. Not to mention that even your example wouldn't happen if religion didn't exist.
Lets go to the root then. Its not one religion persecuting another one. That's just the outer shell. If you break the shell open you'll see its the corrupt minds and hearts of the people doing the persecuting. Its people persecuting other people. Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jainist, Buddhist is just a label they carry around pasted on them like a name. People sufferer from narcissism and dogmatism with or without any group of ideas they follow. Because many people are selfish and in love with themselves and dogmatism is often the result of a shortcut. Its much easier to rely on the head of a group you belong to to learn something than to discover and learn things and actually incorporate them as a part of your being for yourself.
Every person alive today is guilty of following a teacher and that's why the bible says teaching is a very, very, very responsible work ...(meaning responsible to God in faith matters, but even in science, math, engineering, business, etc. what everyone teaches is responsible to God because we will all be judged). How many students of chemistry bothered to study chemistry all by themselves like a Bacon or a Newton: almost no one today except a few kids with those little toy chemistry sets and a few chemists in labs. They rely on their teachers in part because you have to. Learning is a process. We might surpass our teachers someday but we don't at the beginning. We all have a starting point.
Atheists are no exception from the flaws of the human race. On the contrary they daily congratulate each other on how much smarter they are than theists and all other human beings in general. A little narcissistic don't you think? Then again I've pretty much concluded that forums in general and poker in particular attract narcissist and other deviant antisocial or predatory types.
So to conclude people are corrupt and fallible and atheists are one of the few groups I'm aware of that exalt themselves over the rest of the mankind by constantly insisting on their intellectual superiority. I haven't personally experienced atheists to be a particulary compassionate group or to even have particularly developed EQs. There are 3 or 4 individual exceptions I've noted in SMP/RGT but as a group I suspect atheists might earn a fail grade in the EQ department. Oh sure, they are smart enough to turn the EQ on when its of personal benefit to them but I doubt many of them can sustain it. I've even read one SMP atheist post confirming that that is his approach to the world. He never posts in RGT. He appears to have a whale of a superiority complex though. At least thats the way he appears in a forum which is a somewhat limiting format to understand what makes another person tick because people are a whole lot more multidimensional in person than on here.