emmline wrote:Wombat wrote:Atheism isn't a cognitive defect that needs to be explained away as due to immaturity or something like that.
Now, Wombly...it sounds like you're getting a little sensitive yourself!
Calling the response
emotional is not the same as calling it a
cognitive defect or an
immature response.
Plus, I'm not patronizing the guy. I don't know him. I'm just taking an objective guess, like everybody else. If he were sitting here I would tend to keep my mouth shut because I can be tactless and I know it. Plus, my real-time response speed tends to be a little slow.
I think it's equally probable I'm just exasperated.
After all, you didn't take up my challenge. Walden, for example, has admitted that he wouldn't want to be dragged into the rituals of some other religion after he was dead and that is precisely what I would expect a Christian to say.
As for myself, I have been agnostic since the age of about 13. I was never an atheist, let alone an aggressive one. Neither was I an aggressive or zealous agnostic and I would think that this comes across in my posts on religious matters. Very rarely have I had occasion to be exasperated in the way I was pretending to be just now, but to achieve this I had to adopt a patronising attitude to at least one Christian, namely my mother. When I announced that I could no longer continue in the church she was very upset to put it mildly. But I could no more fake belief than I could fake disbelief so this was one of those things that had to be seen through. Now, although she eventually came to accept the absence of outward observance on my part, she continued to talk as though I were still a Christian right up to her death. Since she didn't actually try to reconvert me or anything like that, it did get easier to live with over time. But, fairly obviously, I was the one exercising restraint because it is not very nice to treat a person as though they believe a whole raft of things you know perfectly well they don't believe. It was very easy to think that, in a very real sense, I was a stranger to my own mother.
Cran asked a question which is very interesting. But I think that the answer is, as always in cultural clashes, to retreat to common ground. Pascal's wager really is a dreadful piece of reasoning and nobody should be party to it. But both Cran and his friend can accept that heartfelt best wishes are appropriate and that is common ground. I am utterly mystified why that would not be enough and why Cran couldn't see that straight away.
At the risk of being patronising myself, I'll try to explain why some believers would not think that it is enough. You'll have to ask yourselves whether this is how you were thinking. You might reason as follows. I believe in God and the efficacy of prayer and so I have to believe that it is rational to do so. If I thought it were equally rational not to believe in God I'd not believe. So how can I help not think that the poor athiest boy needs help or will grow out of it or some such thing? The answer is that equally rational people, starting from their very different experiences, can each reach opposite conclusions through equally rational thought processes. Of course Christians are going to feel special. But if a Christian genuinely wants fellowship with a non-Christian, it is important to be willing to check that attitude of being uniquely right at the door. The same, of course, goes for the athiest. It doesn't require insincerity; it just requires a bit of sophistication.
Try them now.
Mukade