What's It Like Dealing With Mormons Every Day?
Well that's what I've been doing for two months shy of five years here on a daily basis. On day one these Mormons tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, that I was never a Mormon, that I'm not criticizing their kind of Mormonism, that I have not shown their faith to be impossible, which is an impossible standard, and so forth, coming from the scholarly types as well as the kids in Junior High who think they can argue against me. They use non-sequiturs, red herrings, special pleading, begging the question, and either/or fallacies then beat their chests and crow about how they have refuted me and all atheists. Then comes day two, which is more of the same ignorance. Then comes day three. For nearly five years. I'm tired of playing nice. I'm turning over to the dark side. They are buffoons, utterly devoid of the ability to recognize they are brainwashed who repeat platitudes as if they are something new and profound which I have never heard or thought of before.
You know what I mean? I mean Christianity. I mean Christians. Christianity is dead in the water. It has been debunked so many times it's no longer funny. But Christians keep coming like zombies one after another throwing all they have against me and atheists in general, claiming we have a religion, that we have faith in atheism, that we have the burden to prove something, that atheism produced Hitler and the Holocaust, that Christianity produced democracy, women's liberation, modern science, and the abolition of slavery. They tell us God is righteous and never errs or falters in anything and that most emphatically he never does anything wrong--you wouldn't believe the amount of contorted mental gymnastics required to defend that one!
How many times must I debunk such drivel? It's utterly maddening. I wonder sometimes what it must have felt to be Joseph Lewis who saw only minimum change, if that, his entire lifetime, or Thomas Paine, or Robert Ingersoll, Bertrand Russell, and plenty of others. [Don't look now but some imbecile was about to tell me I'm no Russell or Ingersoll. I know that, idiot.]
Of course, this is the reason why I profusely thank the reasonable commenters I have here at DC for keeping me from having to deal with such idiocies. It really helps me greatly lest the Christians wear me out. Again, it means a lot to me. If you like what I have to say, and want me to continue on a daily basis, I need your help. Thanks so much. Together we're making a difference.
You know what I mean? I mean Christianity. I mean Christians. Christianity is dead in the water. It has been debunked so many times it's no longer funny. But Christians keep coming like zombies one after another throwing all they have against me and atheists in general, claiming we have a religion, that we have faith in atheism, that we have the burden to prove something, that atheism produced Hitler and the Holocaust, that Christianity produced democracy, women's liberation, modern science, and the abolition of slavery. They tell us God is righteous and never errs or falters in anything and that most emphatically he never does anything wrong--you wouldn't believe the amount of contorted mental gymnastics required to defend that one!
How many times must I debunk such drivel? It's utterly maddening. I wonder sometimes what it must have felt to be Joseph Lewis who saw only minimum change, if that, his entire lifetime, or Thomas Paine, or Robert Ingersoll, Bertrand Russell, and plenty of others. [Don't look now but some imbecile was about to tell me I'm no Russell or Ingersoll. I know that, idiot.]
Of course, this is the reason why I profusely thank the reasonable commenters I have here at DC for keeping me from having to deal with such idiocies. It really helps me greatly lest the Christians wear me out. Again, it means a lot to me. If you like what I have to say, and want me to continue on a daily basis, I need your help. Thanks so much. Together we're making a difference.
33 comments:
keep up the good work. don't let the delusional people get you down. some day we will win, but we can't stay silent. i was once delusional but am now free thanks to people like you.
Don't get discouraged John, I think religious belief is more about psychology than logic. So one of the advantages of being an ex evangelical christian, as opposed to a skeptic who never believed, is that I and you and probably many people here can remember what it was like feel that assurance, that certainty, that you were right and that your relationship to Jesus trumped all. You had a bunch of friends at church who had your back and reinforced your belief, as well as authority figure pastors who could teach the bible and build that certainty in you that the bible and christianity was from god. What are some skeptics with hard hearts who don't want to see the truth going to do against that?
I can certainly remember that mindset. I didn't think of myself as any kind of stupid moron. Over the course of 25 years I've rejected my christianity and all religions, but my remembrance of my christian mindset is still there, and while I now reject what they say, I understand why they say it.
"I'm tired of playing nice. I'm turning over to the dark side."
Just wondering what you think this will accomplish? I realize you're frustrated, annoyed and fed-up. But then why continue? Presumably because you think you are making a difference, that you are convincing people. But do you truly think that "turning over to the dark side" will be a more effective means of (de)conversion?
I dunno... Breckmin at least provides some well needed comedy relief...
I don't care what anyone wants to believe. It is none of my business.
But I do find it irritating when trolls show up here with no intention other than "saving souls", which in the real world amounts to aggravating those who think differently. I don't go to young earth creationist sites and tell them they are throwing their life away for a lie, the only one they will ever get. Why can't we expect the same courtesy from the believers?
I use to have a similar problem when I would try and convert others to my beliefs. I came to the conclusion that it's no good trying to force my views on others. All I can do is say what works for me. I still get caught up in it sometimes but I'm getting better at it. I just try to remind myself of the serenity prayer. If you don't believe in God just take the God part out.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Acceptance
And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation--some fact of my life--unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment....
unless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy.
I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.
Big Book.
@Epicurus: "I think religious belief is more about psychology than logic." A very fitting quotation for your name (cf. Lucretius)!
Don't let the bastards get you down, John, as the saying goes. Have a few beers or a couple White Russians and I reckon you'll feel right as rain. :D
"Christianity is dead in the water. It has been debunked so many times it's no longer funny. "
Now THAT'S funny!!
One of the ironies I find about DC is the lack of realization that Christianity can NOT be debunked!
Why is that?
Several reasons.
Let's look first at the Judeo-Christian Creator. He is an Infinite Existence. God is. God exists. God declares "I AM" and this is as accurate as we can understand Him...but the REALITY is that God can NOT be defined.
How can you somehow "debunk" the Infinite Creator Who can NOT be defined by mere finite humans???
More irony.
The same thing could be said of Ontological Incarnation or even "choice" itself to limited degree. The reality is that there are certain "why's" (multiple causes and influences from a self-generating being of volition) that can NOT be defined.
How can you debunk something that can NOT be defined.
There are more things I could discuss here...but the reality is that Christianity will NEVER be debunked...
and this is no accident.
Question everything!
Question why you have NO standard of justification to appeal to by which you could claim anything the Owner and Creator of the universe does is somehow "unjustified."
If it is already justified philosophically because it IS the standard... then perhaps there are reasons of a greater good that we need to learn and discover.
I say there are answers (which I seldom see here)...which DO provide co-existing justification.
What I can't answer is what I would logically trust the Infinite Creator of the universe to know better than I (a finite being with a disposition toward rebellion with this flesh that battles me).
Meh, I know what you mean. It's probably much worse for somebody like yourself who actually makes a living out of this but for me, hearing the same bullshit argument over and over again, well, it's not entertaining any more.
I used to argue nice, point out flaw after flaw, post after post but these days I just call an idiot a fucking idiot. It's quicker and I don't waste energy in the futile struggle of arguing with somebody who is imposing idiocy on themselves.
That's the worst part of debating a religionut: they force stupidity on themselves and it irritates me.
Right on Shawn! I feel ya.
John
Dealing with guys like Breckmin and Jorge would cross anyone over to the dark side. Breckmin continually regurgitates the same garbage that we have all ready thought threw and rejected. Well, first we actually practiced it and passionately believed it, then we left.
Look you are a published author that is making a difference and getting a following. I say keep on trucking brother and if you cross over so be it!
John, believe me when I tell you that I know how you feel. At times
it can be very frustrating. It's
been only two years since my
father--a Christian preacher--and I
have reconciled (sort of) our differences. We hardly communicated
for almost ten years all because of my freethinker-atheistic position. My oldest sister and I were outcasts in our own Christian
family. And when my younger sister
came to her own sense and started to think for herself and question a
religion that was imposed upon her,
they made it so difficult for her
that pushed her to the brink of a
nerve brakedown.
I know you understand that no rationalization is too far fetched if someone wish to believe in something; even when that something
does not tally with reasonableness.
And there is abolutely nothing you
can say that would change their mind. All one needs to do is look
at the incredible amount of theistic shoehorning and hodgepodge
that is daily posted on this site,
to vouch for a non-empirical proposition. The belief in an
"after life" seems to have a strong
appealing and offers a soothing comfort to those who cannot come to grip with the idea that death might be "it." So all of their reasoning and tortuous stretching of the imagination revolve around
this comforting idea. And this idea
transcends any lack of clarity, discrepancies, and outright absurdities inherent in it.
But do not let that discourage you and keep on doing what you are doing. There are many people, as we
speak, struggling with their own belief and they are searching; and so your contribution is serving its
purpose.
Take a deep breath. Count to 1,534,676.4. Go for a walk. :-)
I'm tired of playing nice. I'm turning over to the dark side.
Finally!
@GearHeadEd: Breckmin at least provides some well needed comedy relief...
Ed, I generally agree with you, but I have to disagree with you here. I can never understand why anyone finds people like Breckmin amusing. I don't; I find them appalling. I've said this here before - conservative Christians are the worst people in the world. They are the worst people who have ever lived. They have no problem with the idea of the eternal torture of billions of their human siblings - very often, even their own children. Many of them are Calvinists, and believe that God created them expressly for that purpose - and, again, the have absolutely no problem with this. None. The bottom line is that as long as they're saved, that's all that matters. They are the most selfish, self-centered people in all of human history.
Moreover, they are responsible for electing the criminals and lunatics who've orchestrated our current socioeconomic crisis, from which we aren't going to recover - and, as we continue to go down, we'll be taking the rest of the world down with us. These people are the single greatest threat to human continuity in the tragic history of our sorry species.
I say it all the time; the mounting evidence continues to identify it as a neurological disorder. They're a genetic dead end. Quarantine them, along with their Islamic fundamentalist counterparts, and breed them out of the genome. It's our only hope. Tragically, of course, this will never happen. We haven't got but a few years left - and, as we go under, the last Christian, on his deathbed, will curse those whom he knows to be the real culprits responsible for humanity's demise - the liberals, the atheists and the gays.
So you'll pardon me for not joining you in enjoying their antics. They aren't funny. They're garbage.
@John - Illegimi non-carborundum!!
Onward through the fog. People like you with your message "saved" someone like me. I am where I am today because someone like you and Hitchens and "Darwin's pit bull" continued your rational message. There are others - shining a light always dispels darkness. Keep your light on!
Thanks again!
I would suggest that the problem is that you've set yourself up for failure here John.
You haven't contented yourself to merely declaring Mormonism to be unlikely, unproven, or not compelling. If you'd done that, you might have a leg to stand on here.
But you have instead tried to take it farther and assert that anyone who is Mormon is "obviously" deluded, that the whole thing has been "clearly" debunked "so many times it's not even funny."
Well, no - you haven't established that. And you likely never will. Because religion is not "obviously" wrong, and not everyone who adheres to it is and idiot.
You've set yourself an impossible standard of proof, and now when you've fallen on your face, you're coming here to whine to people who agree with you.
In short, you sound every bit as fanatical, unreasonable and deluded as the people you are attacking.
Atheism - always at its strongest when it isn't asserting anything in particular at all.
Seth R., maybe so. I continue re-evaluating my goals.
The bottom line is that religion is here to stay...
religion is here to stay.
religion is here to stay.
religion is here to stay.
religion is here to stay.
There. I feel better already.
Thanks to everyone for your comments and encouragement!
I think John really intended to leave the second 'm' out of the title...
GearHedEd
;-)
What's the difference?
Moron is as moron does.
"I say there are answers (which I seldom see here)...which DO provide co-existing justification.
What I can't answer is what I would logically trust the Infinite Creator of the universe to know better than I (a finite being with a disposition toward rebellion with this flesh that battles me)."
Have you been touching yourself again?
You are quite wrong, Seth.
Mormonism does make claims that falsiable and indeed have been falsified. Most notably, concerning the origins of native peoples of the Americas. Its claim contradict tons if historical, archaeological, and genetic evidence.
The one who is deluded is you.
Breckmin: How can one debunk the infinite Creator....
Does this work (thank you Steve Zara)?
1. Thinking and acting are temporal and spacial in that the processes move through time and include the storage of information. Beings that think and act do so in a space/time continuum.
2. Beings that create do so by thinking and acting.
3. Therefore, a being that would create must do so in a pre-existing space/time.
For instance the phrase 'God said, Let there be light' involves the storage of linguistic information and the passage of words through time.
cipher
good to see ya, I could not remember ware I read the Quarantine solution before. Now I remember it was a comment you made on one of John's post's a few months ago.
I posted your solution, that I agree with here on this blog. Old Myers had a fit, check it out and maybe respond to it..
It definitely sucks dealing with morons every day, but what can you do?
John,
Do not despair. Secularization is a reality. Not only that, it can be very rapid and dramatic. Many of the least religious nations of today were the most pious ones of yesteryear.
The Netherlands was one day the land of devout calvinists. Spain and Argentina went from catholic-military dictatorships to legalizing gay marriage in 2-3 decades.
There is reason for guarded optimism.
Perhaps I'm just deranged, but I rather like to watch the tortured mental gymnastics. It is always amazing to watch people argue A and Not A at the same time, and then attempt to say that I have the burden of showing why their position makes no sense.
I understand your frustration, however. The way in which Faith enables and absolves believers from any and all of their tortured logic and from any and all responsibility for actually dealing with the abhorrent things that are explicitly advocated in their sacred scrolls. It's appalling. You can win every argument, but at the end of the day they simply refuse to see. They are willfully blind.
I like to think of this as a long term project. Like building a planet or a star. It's a slow process of accretion. I didn't abandon Faith over the course of a day or a week or even a year. It was the slow accretion of knowledge, the slow accretion of facts, inconsistencies, contradictions that gradually destroyed the facade of Faith. Eventually I simply realized that I was trying to hard to explain something that made no fricking sense.
Some of the obvious Fundamentalists posing as agnostics are obviously annoying and have no interest in understanding, but even with them, I have hope that with sufficient exposure to their own mental gymnastics, even some of them may realize that they're twisting themselves up in knots trying to avoid the obvious.
Keep up the good work!
exreformed,
I find that often, former fundies want to think well of the people they left behind.
Jeffrey, I'd argue that your experience doesn't suggest that every funamentalist, or even most, can be reached eventually. Rather, I think you were one of the few who had the innate capacity to get out. John thinks that I think what he does is pointless, but that isn't the case at all. I think John provides a service by writing and blogging. Those who are capable of getting the point, will. I do think debating Christian apologists formally and publicly is completely pointless. The partisans of each side walk away absolutely convinced that their guy won.
Anyway, my point stands. They are the single greatest threat, past or present, to human continuity. They will be our undoing.
Jeffrey,
Its funny that you mention the Coles and other "agnostic" poseurs that we've noticed more and more on DC... Not really funny but I can only see good things coming from them posing like they are/do. Sometimes playing the devils advocate (pun intended) is an instructive tool. Sometimes arguing the opposite of what you believe on faith serves to instruct you and teach you. Maybe it'll do them some good to try to argue from our perspective. It's kind of what happened to me.
By that I mean that along with all the other factors that led to my abandonment of Christianity was my heartfelt desire to stop the fundamentalist in their endeavor to take us back to the middle ages. I argued against fundamentalists Christians for years and part of what I used to argue against the more fundamentalist stances was agnostic thought and arguments.
Eventually I guess it just sunk in and so here I am. It served to make my final decision time more easy... Kind of.
@ Cipher, Les
I suppose you could say that I have 'Faith' (pun intended) in the ultimate triumph of reason. I think of my own journey and I look at the statistics on how religiosity is declining here and in most of the civilized world and I look at the progress we have made as a species and I have faith that we as a species will that reason will eventually win the day. I think in many ways it already has.
But then again I'm an optimist.
Keep active, John. Your voice is very important and you are helping people.
I read all your posts.
My experience with Mormons is that their religion is like a ball and chain, some are quite fatalistic about it. For example, I've seen women with real artistic talent who never really attempted to use it. Why put your heart into something when your family is going to swoop down and tell you to put away all selfish personal achievements and report for duty as a housewife? It seems so many had their dreams spoiled by the demands of their community, and they don't hesitate to crush other people's dreams.
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