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More offensive? To Whom? You have a right to your opinion and others have a right to theirs.
You also have a right to keep your mouth shut about what you believe. It's offensive to others when you feel that you have to let them know that you think they are crazy. No one knows for sure....but you might spend eternity doing nothing but feeding the worms.
What's more offensive, me calling Christians crazy or Christians telling me, as an atheist, that I will spend eternity burning in flames?
I feel both situations to be rather offensive, which one more than the other would likely depend on an individual's personal perspective. I feel though, that you have likely run into some "false" Christians--there are many of them out there who wish to place themselves in the judgment seat of God. These people are giving Christians a bad reputation, and it is no wonder that those not blessed by faith have a generally negative impression of believers in Christ. My own impression is that as a group, Christians have largely fell away from Scripture-based teachings and have adopted many doctrines of men; but then I have not done any research into it and it remains a vague impression I get from the things I pick up from society. Something which seems so certain to me (yet which again, I cannot know for sure unless I go out and research it) is the profound biblical illiteracy of Christians; I really hope I am wrong about that, or if I am not that it will change over time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by franklin_mac
More often than not, religious people are easier to get along with than proud atheists.
One thing I found illogical about atheists is their request of Christians to validate their faith by proof of God when the very meaning of faith is to believe without proof. I feel this should have been a very obvious fact to me, yet as an adolescent I was swayed very heavily by this request.
I think that telling religious people that they are crazy is a bit more offensive because crazy is a real thing and hell is a figment of their imagination.
Although I am tempted to think that religious or other superstitious people are crazy or stupid, I think it's unproductive, and even counter productive, to say so. I think it's also inaccurate. I know plenty of people who are religious and are smart, not stupid. They just happen to not be able to think rationally or to challenge the indoctrination they received as children in this particular area, but that's not the same as being either crazy or stupid. Calling them crazy or stupid is needlessly insulting.
On the other hand, saying someone is going to go to hell is like telling them that when they go to sleep the bogey man is going to come in and do surgery on them and remove their sole from their spleen, or telling them that their mother will break her back if they step on a crack in the sidewalk. It's not going to happen, so why is this imaginary threat offensive?
(The only counterpoint to this, which is a not insignificant one, is that someone who tells you you are going to hell presumably believes in the existence of an all-perfect god that decides who goes to hell, so saying that you're going to hell is another way of saying that you deserve to be punished for all eternity. I suspect that most religious people who say this don't think it through to this logical conclusion, though, any more than an atheist who calls a religious person crazy is prepared to supply a DSM diagnosis for the religious person's condition.) (Hint: probably delusional disorder, 297.1.) (Proviso: psychiatrists have told me that religious beliefs are by definition not delusions because they are consensually confirmed within the community.)
I can't connect with either extremes and so i don't try to. At the core, it's both one and the same to me, each just approaches from a different angle.
More often than not, religious people are easier to get along with than proud atheists.
This may be true (or it might not be), but if it is true, I suspect it is true for one of two reasons: either the religious person is being nice because he wants to score points with god, OR he is being nice because he wants to recruit you into his church.
Look. No stranger has ever knocked on my door or walked up to me in the street and asked "Have you rejected the false dogma of the organized church yet?" or handed me a flyer explaining why I need to reject the Lord.
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Same Difference
