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-Removed-do you really think people are mocked? i dont see it like that, except maybe dasa. i see the majority of it as banter, most of the the theists its aimed at give as good as they get. obviously there are exceptions, but in general its all done in good spirit. isnt it?
Originally posted by Grampy BobbyThe whole question.
twhitehead, which points require clarification?
I agree with GKR that there is no such thing as 'the atheist' so will assume you are asking about me. What do you mean by 'deepest sense of identity'? What do you mean by 'selfhood'? And what do you mean by 'destiny'?
I am tempted to answer 'none' to all three, but I strongly suspect that you are talking in a different plane.
Who am I? I am me. What more is there to say?
I don't believe in fate or destiny.
I don't think it's a moot point in fact it's a fair question. It's just that from your OP it seemed as though you had already made up your mind. To be fair, you partially corrected that in one of your responses to JS357.
As for Joe667's posts (I assume you meant him), first of all he's far from representative for "the atheist on this forum" because he posts very little (compared to other atheists), second if you look up his post history most of his posts are quite to the point. There may be a "mocking tone" in some of them, but that's just a writing style. We're not all the same. I honestly don't feel - based on his recent forum posts which you can look up in his profile - that he mock's only to mock.
Look up his recent forum posts and then tell me that the majority of them aren't out of "interest"* but out of a need to mock religious people. I wonder if you can honestly keep saying that.
*interest in something of course doesn't mean that you have to be positive about something.
If you maintain that Joe's post are mostly mocking and thus reprehensible, you either need to grow a thicker skin or save your sensible self from getting hurt and not read a forum which you know is visited by a good number of atheists, all of whom have different ways of communicating. His posts are not mocking and certainly not reprehensible. In fact, there are hardly any posts here that are reprehensible, except for the ones that call for the extinction of a certain group of people by Dasa.
Since you started this thread, do you feel your questions have been answered? Or is anything still unclear to you? If so, what is unclear?
-Removed-I would disagree that mockery is reprehensible - it tends to be indicative that one side of an argument genuinely holds a position that is not only stupid - it is self-evidently stupid.
For example, if I asserted that 2 + 2 = 4, I find it very difficult to imagine that anyone could find a way to mock that statement in such way that they did not invite greater mockery on their own door. Of course some might remind me that making such an assertion is pointless because nobody in their right mind would have any reason to disagreement but that hardly qualifies as mockery.
On the other hand, if I asserted That tornadoes kill nice people because:
6000 years ago, in a magic garden called "Eden", some man and a woman listened to a talking snake and ate a naughty fruit that gives knowledge of right and wrong This ticked off, and surprised, an all knowing magical man in the sky so much so that he decided that the payment for this atrocity is death. He then later reasoned that the best way to make reparations for that act is to send a variant of its own self to be crucified on Earth to pay the price it itself needlessly set in the first place - and that for anyone who fails to believe this crap they (well actually their flammable souls) are going to burn forever and ever in some big old lake of fire after dying a horrible death here on Earth - because they failed to accept their tendency for doing things said magic man in the sky doesn't like us doing was handled by a clone of itself that likes walking on water and rising from the dead.
then that would clearly be a stupid belief - one that is never going to be corrected with a cool head and a rational argument.